


Paranormality

by Eristastic



Series: Paranormality [1]
Category: End Roll (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Biting, Caretaking, Found Family, M/M, Paranormal, Team as Family, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-08-28 05:37:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8433808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eristastic/pseuds/Eristastic
Summary: Working at Dreamsend - a company of exorcists, vampire hunters and the like - isn't easy. Nor is it easy to be a vampire hunter with a boisterous half-vampire as your partner. Walter struggles.
In a nearby forest, Russell lives with his (clingy) reflection and (very) extended family-but-not-by-blood, and everything would by blissful if he only didn't feel like he was forgetting something.
 
[A set of drabbles in an undead au. The main/focus characters change]





	1. To Cauterise With a Kiss

**Author's Note:**

> I came up with a [sort of Halloween au](https://twitter.com/eristastic/status/792769506372415488) so here we are. I like the idea, and I'd like to write the other characters so I'm leaving this as incomplete, but I don't currently have any plans for other chapters.
> 
> This chapter: Raymond/Walter-focussed

‘ _I don’t want to work with him. I don’t want anything to do with him._ ’

It was funny how one could make one’s wishes perfectly clear in every imaginable way and still be misunderstood. Though, logically, Walter knew he hadn’t been misunderstood. He’d been ignored, and thus had been teamed up with Raymond, despite his being _half-vampire_ and Walter’s job being to hunt down vampires. It was entirely unfair, but no matter how many times he’d submitted complaints to Dreamsend’s administration department, he’d been turned down every time.

And after that much frustration, he hadn’t had the energy to do anything but resign himself. It was unfortunate how that worked.

 

*

 

Walter wasn’t sure he was seeing or hearing anything properly. Everything felt too loud – the ticking of his office clock, the slight rustle of paper under his arms, the gentle hum of his laptop – but he was too tired to care. His eyes kept falling shut, and it took a demoralising amount of energy to open them again. He felt so demoralised, in fact, that he thought he might give in, deadline or no. He wouldn’t sleep for _that_ long, surely. He had a very good track record of only sleeping three hours a night when he did get to his bed, so a nap shouldn’t take much longer than that.

Satisfied that there was no reason not to, he sunk his head onto his arms, closed his eyes, and almost cried when the door opened.

“Walter, have you…”

He looked up (possibly glaring as he did so) to see Yue in the doorway. She was holding onto the door awkwardly, not quite in, not quite out. Walter almost wished it was Raymond, because he could at least shout at Raymond without feeling like a total ass for doing so.

Regretting it, he sat up and waved her in.

There were a lot of books stacked on the floor, so it was a good thing Yue was a slight woman. Somehow, she managed to walk through to the desk, wringing her hands not-quite-anxiously.

“Have you still got that book on medieval witchcraft around the Rhine?” she asked quietly, eyes scanning the hundred or so books piled on his desk as if she’d find it there. “There’s something I need to check for an exorcism, and I’m not sure if you ever gave it back.”

“No, you’re…” –he yawned– “you’re right: I didn’t. It’s around here somewhere. Sorry Yue, I’ll look for it now,”

Clearly she needed it badly, as she nodded and waited for him to start rootling through the books within hand’s reach. He knew it was either in the left pile on his desk or next to the coat hooks at the foot of the larger bookcase, but it was a flimsy little book, easily eaten up by the larger hardcovers he usually worked with.

“I see you’re busy,” Yue said after he’d given up on the desk stacks and gone to the corner of the room.

“A little, yes.”

“Did they ask you to write up your report with too little notice?”

“No, nothing like that,” he said absent-mindedly, crouching down and thumbing through book spines. “Things have just been…busy lately.”

“Ah.”

He could tell she was nodding. Of course she understood: everyone in the office knew that Raymond had a habit, for lack of a better word, of dragging him around. Raymond was useless everywhere except in direct combat: it made sense that he’d be eager to get out in the field. It therefore made sense not to team him up with a researcher, and yet.

“Is it that bad?” Yue asked, sniffing against the paper dust.

“It isn’t good. He has a penchant for adventure that I can’t say I share.”

“I see. How _is_ that cut healing up?”

“It’s getting there.” He looked back and smiled at her. The cut in question was a particularly nasty scar along his shoulder and upper arm, courtesy of a vampire’s fangs as they’d been dragged away from his neck by an incensed Raymond. Not an experience Walter had any wish to repeat. He was quite happy to let Raymond do the fighting while he stayed in the background, preparing the proper ritual for killing the things.

Or research. Research, of course, was his true passion.

“At any rate,” he said with an _oof_ as he heaved a pile of books off the main stack and onto the floor, “I don’t have much time to do my own work anymore. I have to take what chances I can get.”

“Chances that only occur around eleven pm?”

“Oh, eleven isn’t that late. You can’t tell me you go to bed before eleven. Anyway,” –he stood up, his thighs screaming with the effort– “here’s your book.”

He handed it to her and she started to leaf through it. The room seemed to settle down, dust landing gently on every available surface with only Walter’s slow, winding path back to his desk to disturb it.

Yue made a small sound of satisfaction around the time he sat back down. “That’s what I wanted.” She lifted her head and gave him a small smile. “Thank you for finding it for me.”

“Are you in the middle of a job?”

“I wouldn’t say so. I haven’t been assigned a proper job since…” she inclined her head meaningfully.

Walter nodded in understanding. “I imagine they’re just a little wary, still processing our proposals. If they were thinking of firing us for it, they would have done so already.”

“I think so too. Have you been to the settlement since?”

“I thought it would be wiser to keep a low profile. _I_ thought it would be a bad idea to let the higher-ups think there’s anything unprofessional or, ah, sentimental going on,” Walter said neatly, shuffling through the documents on his desk.

“I see. And did Raymond share that opinion?”

The papers creased under his tensed fingers. “No. We’ve been twice.”

“That’s good.” Yue was smiling, and he couldn’t tell whether it was out of pity or amusement. “I’m glad you’re still visiting them. I got the impression you got along well with Russell and that ghost I was assigned to exorcise.”

“Dogma.”

“That’s the one.”

“Well.” He put the papers down. “That’s neither here nor there.”

“No, I’m sure it’s not.”

“You’re just saying that to try and placate me, aren’t you?”

“I might be.” She looked at the book in her hand again and then pushed away from the bookcase she’d been leaning against. “I should go back. Do try not to do too much overtime, won’t you? I’ll send Raymond in to check on you when he comes back from buttering up Finances.”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Walter said firmly, but Yue only waved goodbye and left.

Walter watched her shut the door, and then stared at it for several minutes.

It was impossible. There was no way he was going to get back to researching vampire physical reconstitution like this. Even with the data he’d got from Gardenia (and what a cheerful, helpful test subject she’d been), he couldn’t concentrate. Closing his eyes, he hung his head back and thought about trying to sleep again.

He couldn’t. There was the unpleasant feeling that he should be working, the constant stress of wondering when the next job would be sprung on them ( _him_. On him), and now the worry that he, Raymond, Fairia and Yue were going to face something worse than they’d imagined for how they’d treated the Seager case.

It had been an odd one, to be sure. It certainly wasn’t normal to find two ghosts, two vampires, two zombies, a revived skeleton, and a probably-alive old man living with a human boy. It had been given the highest priority possible, the four of them had been put on the job, and they’d arrived to find a peaceful, domestic little settlement in a forest. Suffice to say, they hadn’t followed their orders to exorcise and/or kill all the undead they could.

They hadn’t followed their orders in the slightest.

Raymond, surprisingly, had been the one to suggest that they all submit reports explaining the situation instead of trying to cover it up. The suggestion had more sense once Walter had found out that Raymond had spent the entire night drinking with one of the vampires – Kantera – and the skeleton – Yumi – but it didn’t really matter where the idea came from, only that it suited all of them. It violated protocol shockingly, but it still suited them, just about.

In the history of his career, Walter had never faced such a split between duty and desire, and it hadn’t been any surprise to him what he’d chosen, but then, that was Raymond’s influence for you. Awful. Despicable. He hadn’t even hesitated.

Awful.

Walter sighed. If it came back to punish them all, he was going to use Raymond as a shield the best he could.

“What are you sighing about?”

Walter’s eyes snapped open and he jumped, choking on air, and would have sent the chair tipping backwards if Raymond hadn’t been there to hold it in place. He was grinning (the asshole), clearly enjoying being enough of a vampire to sneak up without making a sound.

“Miss me?” he asked. His head was blocking the light so his face was mostly in shadow, but Walter could recognise a smirk when he saw one.

He scowled. His neck was complaining about being bent so far backwards, he was still exhausted, and Raymond had no business barging (even silently) into his office. “No. Not at all. Go back.”

“Walter, you wound me! I spend all my free time working to make your life easier, and this is how I’m thanked?”

“You spent the evening drinking with all the secretaries from the finance division.”

“I did.”

“Go _away_.” He sat back up, the top of his head narrowly missing Raymond’s chin, and slumped on the desk. Idly, he wondered if Raymond would leave if he ignored him for long enough. It had never worked before, but he decided it was worth another attempt.

“ _Someone’s_ cranky today,” Raymond sniffed from behind him, emphatically still there. “Too much research and not enough fresh air. You need to get out of this place more! Correction: you need to get out of this place more, but you should probably be with me while you do it. Incidentally, there’s this great tapas place one of the girls told me about – we should go there tomorrow night!”

“If you think I’d willingly spend time with you while I have a report to write, you’re delusional.”

“I’ll make a reservation.”

“Don’t you _dare_.”

Raymond bent down, almost whispering into Walter’s ear. “Intimidated because I’m taking advantage of your intense hatred of missing bookings?”

“I’m mostly disgusted, actually.” He rested his head on his arms, wishing he could just fall asleep. There was too much to do, and he couldn’t think straight. When Raymond started to massage his shoulders (badly), he didn’t even have the strength to tell him not to.

“God, you _are_ tense,” Raymond said critically. “Do you stretch at all or do you just spend all your time hunched over?”

“Shut up.”

“If I’m massaging you, you can listen to me.” He dug his thumbs in to the knot at the top of Walter’s spine, and Walter’s breath caught in his throat. Raymond said, “Enjoy that?” and every syllable was tainted with that smug, smug smile of his.

Walter didn’t deign to reply.

Raymond sighed dramatically. “Research is great and all, but you need to rest a bit. Get out and do some field work! I mean sure, once the jobs start coming in again, you’ll be covered, but right now this is just a disgrace.”

“Well, sorry for being a disgrace,” Walter said through gritted teeth. He had to grit them: every circle Raymond’s thumbs pushed into his shoulders was dangerously close to making him moan out loud or something equally unacceptable. Unacceptable, mostly because Raymond would never let him forget it.

“Nah, you’re fine. You just need to relax a bit more, y’know? I could help you with that.”

“I’m sure you could. You won’t be getting the chance.”

“Ice cold, Walter.”

He didn’t say anything back to that. There didn’t seem to be much to say. He was too tired to act out the script of vaguely-good-natured scrapping, and he was far too proud to do what he’d wanted to do all along and let someone else take care of him for an hour or so. If that person had to be Raymond, so be it. Or rather, don’t, because the very idea of giving in made Walter want to rip his own nails out.

A tad exaggerated, perhaps.

Raymond was getting close. His breath was just a little too warm on the back of Walter’s neck, tangible even through his shirt. Walter felt like every part of his body was reacting to the slow rhythm of fingers pressing into his back, making him arch his spine without quite meaning too.

“Have you been getting enough sleep?” Raymond asked softly, the raised pitch at the end infinitely gentle.

“Of course I have.” His voice sounded too coarse in comparison.

“Liar.” A stronger push, and Walter lifted his head, his mouth open as if on the cusp of crying out.

He didn’t, of course.

“Have you been eating right?” Still soft, still low, still too close.

“ _Yes_.”

Now his head was up, he could see the door was closed, which was good. Some good things. What was happening behind him was less of a good thing, but – in a different way – unspeakably better.

“You’re a terrible liar.”

“I’m not,” Walter protested. “You just knew the answers before asking.”

“True.” Mercilessly, he forced both of his thumbs in between Walter’s shoulder blades, and Walter did cry out then, humiliatingly. It was a small, ragged cry, and he could practically feel the smugness radiating from behind him.

The hands dropped away, and then there was only the flat hardness of Raymond’s chest against his back. “You need to start taking care of yourself when I’m not here, you know,” he said mildly. He was playing with the hair above Walter’s ear. “If I’m working myself to death trying to make sure everyone likes us, thereby making sure they won’t reject those leniency proposals, then I want to be certain that you’re not researching your way to an early grave. Yeah?” That last word, he said barely an inch from Walter’s ear.

“I’m fine,” Walter said.

“That’s what you said when you got this.” He ran a finger down Walter’s scar, somehow tracing the line perfectly. “I don’t think it means all that much. And you know, it’s such a pain with you lot, because you’re always dying on us. You’re too fragile: you’ll keel over if you forget to eat a vegetable for a few days or something. It’s ridiculous. It’s such a fucking pain, and I don’t want to have to deal with it, okay?”

“It’s not your business, Raymond.”

“Fine. Be cold if you want to.” Slowly – leaving plenty of time for resistance – he reached a hand around to lift Walter’s chin up and angle it to the side. It wasn’t a surprise when he bent down to kiss Walter’s neck. Walter closed his eyes, clenching his hands into fists on the desk as Raymond sucked his skin, the sounds obscene with nothing to cover them up.

It wasn’t a surprise either when the softness of lips and tongue turned to the scrape of teeth. Walter frowned, bracing himself as Raymond kissed up to his ear, sucked on the lobe, and then, treacherously gently, bit through the skin.

Walter bit his lip.

With a brief suck of blood, a quick lave of his tongue to wash it clean, Raymond moved down to Walter’s nape, pushing his hair and shirt away with one hand. He settled on the area he’d just been massaging, kissing the taut flesh next to the top of Walter’s spine, and then began to bite in earnest.

It was not something that half-vampires had to do. Nor did they have to sleep, or come out in sunlight, or interact with people: it was merely a preference to do so. Sucking blood, on occasion, happened to be the way Raymond liked it; by happy coincidence, that was how Walter liked it too.

There was something about the pressure, the way Raymond’s hands clung onto him, the heady feeling of being wanted. There was something, too, about how Raymond lost his senses a little once he got his thirst up, and the raw need in the way he kissed and sucked at the bite was enough to make Walter’s breath come out in thin little whines.

“You mean something,” Raymond said, his voice so muffled as to be almost unintelligible.

“What?”

“You mean something,” he repeated uselessly, pulling at Walter’s shirt so he could kiss down his shoulder. He was going to rip the buttons off, and Walter quickly undid the first two. Breathing in brokenly, Raymond kissed the start of the scar. “You mean something to me, so it’s my business. I didn’t want it to be. You’re _such_ a pain to keep alive.”

He hesitated, breath ghosting over the raw, fresh skin of the scar. The warmth was unwelcome: it was itchy at the best of times, and heat only made it worse. But Walter wasn’t thinking about that at all.

“Like this,” Raymond said in a voice that didn’t sound like his own. Too brittle, perhaps. “Do you have any idea what it was like to see you with that guy hanging off your neck?”

Walter didn’t know. At the time, he’d been too shocked, too drunk on adrenaline and pain to think of anything else. He remembered Raymond’s fear – the visible splintering of his expression into something broken, until there was only manic terror left. He remembered a lot of shouting, and a lot of blood.

It hadn’t, upon reflection, been a good time for either of them.

Ignoring how his joints protested, Walter reached back to put his hand on Raymond’s hair in a half-hearted attempt at ruffling it. Raymond didn’t say anything, or back away, but rather let his hair be stroked, and for some time they stayed like that. The position was convenient, if not comfortable. They didn’t have to let the other see their expressions.

Just as Walter’s arm was beginning to ache, Raymond kissed the scar again and straightened up, rubbing his thumb over the bite he’d left. He didn’t move from behind Walter’s chair, and Walter didn’t get up.

After a moment or so, Raymond asked, “How much more do you have to do?”

It took a second to remember what they’d been talking about earlier. “Couldn’t say. This kind of thing doesn’t just _end_ , Raymond.”

“Then you can come and sleep for a bit now? Excellent.”

Walter sighed. “That is not what I said.”

“No, but it’s what I heard. Come on.” Walking past the desk, he pulled Walter by the arm, leading him out of the room. Walter let himself be led, ignoring the voice pointing out that since he was well and truly awake now, he might as well get some work done.

He was not going to be able to get any work done: he knew that. Nor was he going to sleep for some time, not from the way Raymond was squeezing his hand, and that was fine.

He was used to getting less than the ideal amount of sleep anyway.


	2. Picture-Perfect in Running Watercolours

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to write the 'Spooky Seager Household' a little... I tried to fit everyone in, but it's a struggle with that many characters. Anyway.
> 
> This chapter: Russell (+Informant)-focussed. Russell's definition of family.

“Good morning, Russell!” the Informant beamed from the thin, watery reflection in the window. Russell could see the sunlight come right through him, too bright to see half of his face. It was like talking to a ghost, except that Dogma and Cody were more corporeal than that.

He was just a reflection, after all. Russell nodded back, and went to get dressed.

“It’s going to be cold today,” the Informant informed him, his voice echoing from somewhere Russell couldn’t ever place – somewhere that was everywhere and nowhere at the same time, just distant enough to sound a little tinny, but close enough that he never missed a word. It was the way the Informant talked when he only wanted Russell to hear, so it was the one he used most of the time. Yawning, Russell pulled on trousers.

 “I’d suggest a scarf,” the Informant went on, unfazed by Russell’s apparent lack of interest, “but I think Gardenia and Tabasa and literally everyone else will try and wrap you up if you don’t bother. So if you want to be coddled, just dress as normal!”

Russell’s hand froze on the thin shirt he’d been buttoning up.

The Informant laughed, though not unkindly. “I’m not going to tease you if you _do_ want to be coddled!”

“Yes you will.”

“I won’t! Wear what you like!” In the polished wood of the wardrobe door, Russell could see him smile warmly. “It’s nice to be looked after, isn’t it?”

There was little point in agreeing. The Informant already knew. Russell finished buttoning his shirt, pulled on a pair of socks, and went to the bathroom. It was almost shockingly cold compared to the main bedroom, but that was what he got for choosing the tower suite. If he’d wanted to take a shower, it would have warmed up soon enough, but as it was, he made a beeline for the sink and started to wash his face. The lamps burst into life when he was about a step away from them, and every reflective surface in the bathroom flashed with the warm light. The house was like that sometimes.

Russell washed his face, plunged said face into a nearby towel, and looked up into the gold-framed mirror to see the Informant looking him up and down.

“Your fringe needs combing,” he said, and leaned a little closer until it almost looked as if his nose would press against the mirror. “And you’ve got _terrible_ bags under your eyes. You should be sleeping earlier, as I always say.”

“Yes, you do,” Russell agreed, drying his hands.

“You could at least pretend you’re going to try, Russell.”

“I could. I won’t.” He looked up, a tiny smile pushing his cheeks up. “Don’t you prefer it when I’m honest with you?”

If the Informant was at all taken back, he didn’t show it. Smiles did seem to be his default expression, and he stood back in a satisfied way. “I do! Not that I think you know how to _not_ be honest with me–”

“Oh, I could try.”

“Bet you couldn’t.”

“Bet I could.”

“Bet you couldn’t, but also let’s stop because I don’t want you to try. Now! Come on!” He gestured to himself in the bathroom mirror. Russell stared at him mildly.

The Informant rolled his eyes. “Now don’t tell me you think you’re too cool for good morning kisses.”

“It’s not as if I do this with anyone else.”

“Of course you don’t. If you did, I wouldn’t feel special anymore. Come on!” The Informant smiled encouragingly.

Really, there hadn’t been any reason to question it in the first place. They did it every morning, because rituals were easy to slip into, and Russell couldn’t see a good reason to stop this one.

Rather than simply not stopping, there were reasons to keep doing it too, of course.

Obediently, Russell pressed his cheek to the chilled mirror, and felt the tiniest brush of warmth on his skin. Barely there, and almost certainly intangible to anyone else. When he straightened up, the Informant was smiling like he didn’t know how to set his face differently.

“Mireille’s cooking downstairs,” he said while Russell ran a brush through his fringe and called the rest a lost cause. “You should probably go and see her.”

The Informant was never wrong about these things, so Russell left the bathroom, fished a waistcoat out of his wardrobe on the way out (‘ _Your maroon one would have been better, but that’s fine too_ ,” was the Informant’s verdict from the door-handle), and went downstairs.

It was an old house. More of a castle than a house, really, but three of its inhabitants were vampires, so that seemed par for the course rather than eccentric. And you got used to the appalling drama of it all: thick stone walls; labyrinthine, identical corridors; candles on every wall; dead ends everywhere; at least two ballrooms (ostensibly unused, but Russell didn’t pry into his housemates’ business, so they could have been doing anything there for all he knew).

As long as the zombies lived on the ground floor so they didn’t have to climb up any of the seven flights of stairs, it suited everyone quite well. And if there was an abundance of gilt and stained mirrors around the place, that suited the Informant perfectly.

Come to think of it, it suited Russell perfectly too.

“You look fine,” the Informant said as Russell paused in the darkened hallway that led to the kitchen. “She’s probably going to try and do something with your hair, but that’s just how it is. Just go in and try to be natural.”

Russell knew all that. He wasn’t particularly worried, walking with muffled footsteps on the giant paving stones along the floor. He wasn’t nervous anymore, and he saw the bright light flooding out of the kitchen door as welcoming rather than harbouring danger. But if he felt that way now, it was only because of this.

“Try and say hello first, okay?” the Informant said, briefly reflected in the frame of a painting as Russell knocked and went into the kitchen.

Mireille was stirring a pot on the stove, and she smiled when she saw him. “Good morning, Russell!” she said, her voice cracking a little, and she put her hand over her mouth in surprise. There were new stitches over her fingers, Russell noticed. At least her skin looked a little greyer than green today, which usually meant it was a good day. He went over to the stove and she ruffled his hair in a rather obvious attempt at making a parting.

“How are you?” she asked, turning back to the stove. “O-oh, and the Informant too, of c–”

She was cut off by a distant wail of “ _Gardenia_! Not _again_!” and a cackle of suspiciously Gardenia-sounding laughter. Mireille must have been shocked, since she jumped a little, and apparently that was the last straw for some of the older stitching: without so much as a by your leave, her right hand fell off her wrist and onto the floor.

Russell politely looked away while she picked it up, fretting terribly.

“Oh, I’m s-so sorry, I th-thought that one was s-secure!” she stuttered, stuffing her hand in her apron pocket, visibly mortified. “I’m so, so s-sorry, Russell! Oh, Kantera.”

Russell faded comfortably into the background while Kantera came into the kitchen and greeted them both. He was holding his kimono sleeve to his mouth, his bat-like wings curled almost protectively over his shoulders. The presence of garlic had that effect on him.

“You should ask him how he is,” the Informant suggested in his Russell-only voice. Before there was a chance to say anything, though, Kantera was already leaning against the kitchen table and chatting with Mireille.

“I fear we may have to do something about her,” he said in a pained way. “Gardenia does take such delight in stealing limbs. It’s poor Tabasa’s leg this time.”

“A l-little mischief is normal though, isn’t it? She’ll grow out of it, I’m sure! And she never comes after me, anyway.”

“No, I daresay she doesn’t.” Kantera shared a knowing look with Russell, or rather, gave a knowing look to Russell, who stared back at him blankly. Not out of any lack of understanding, though: picking on Mireille would have been too low, even for Gardenia. Too much of Mireille’s body tended to fall off of its own accord. Tabasa with his sturdier body, on the other hand, was fair game.

“Well, I suppose some entertainment does liven up a morning,” Kantera said dryly, giving no indication that he believed what he was saying. Almost absent-mindedly, he walked over to the counter Russell was standing next to, and ruffled his hair. In the reflection from Gardenia’s prize frying pan hanging off a hook on the wall, the Informant mimed marking a second tally in the air.

“And how are you this morning, Russell?” Kantera asked warmly as Mireille went back to stirring whatever she was cooking. “I trust you slept well?”

Russell nodded. He could feel the Informant’s expectant eyes on him, so he opened his mouth to say more, but Cody got there first.

“You’ll never guess who’s paid us another visit,” she said, floating leisurely through the wall. “Or I suppose you could, since we only ever get visited by like two people. So yeah: those vampire hunters are back.”

Kantera – looking faintly nauseous – let his hand drop from Russell’s head.

Mireille sniffed, turning the heat off. “I understand needing to be tolerant, but does Yumi have to let them into the house? It’s a nightmare, r-really it is! What if they go back on their…their agreement? Mr Saxon isn’t the vampire he used to be!”

Russell noticed with vague interest that her fist was shaking.

“They’re not going to go back on it, Mireille,” Cody soothed, floating closer. “They’re the ones sacrificing a lot for us, so we ought to be grateful.”

Kantera made a snorting sound of disbelief and Cody grimaced. “Well, I mean,” she said reluctantly. “The ones who didn’t get threatened should be grateful, the others should just be…tolerant, like you said.” She spread her hands. “They seem pretty harmless now they’ve worked out that we’re decent people.”

“W-well, I don’t like it!” Mireille said, huffing as she tried to pour a pan of heated blood into several tumblers using only one hand. It splashed, and both Kantera and Russell winced to see the stitches strain on her intact arm.

“You say that, but you really liked those exorcists, didn’t you?” Cody asked pointedly. “Especially the small one. As I remember, you invited her in for tea and wouldn’t let her go until she’d had three cups.”

“Well, th-that’s!” Mireille trembled as she tried to explain herself, and there was a communal sigh of relief when she put the pan down without any more dismemberment. “I know she was trying to exorcise you and Mr Dogma, but she was so small, and cute, and I c-couldn’t help it…”

“Oh, don’t worry: I’m not offended,” Cody laughed. “Much. Anyway, Russell, that half-vampire was asking after you: want to go down and see him? They’re in the east reception room with Yumi.”

Russell nodded and left the kitchen, regretting it only a little. The rest of the house was so cold: it was difficult to leave the kitchen’s hub of warmth and chatter.

“Well, I think that went well,” the Informant said from a darkened window Russell passed. “You’ll be able to hold a conversation in no time! Speaking of which, let’s try out it with Raymond. He’s nice, isn’t he? You should be able to at least answer his questions.”

“I did answer them back there,” Russell said under his breath, safe in the confidence that the Informant would hear anything he said. He took a shortcut through the back stairs, and for a while there was no answer: the back way was woefully under-decorated, and there was nothing reflective. By the time he got out onto the first floor, the Informant was frowning at him from a slightly-tarnished mirror hanging on the wall. Russell stopped to listen to him.

“Okay, first of all,” the Informant said, pointing at him, “you answered with body language, which isn’t the same. Secondly, don’t run away from me like that!”

“I wasn’t running: it’s just faster that way.”

“Oh sure, that’s what it was.” He sighed, his usual smile creeping back in past the specks of black on the mirror’s surface. “Well, whatever makes you happy, okay? Take it at your own pace. You’ll get there.”

Russell nodded, and was about to answer when he felt a slight chill down his back. Suppressing a full-body shiver, he turned around to see Dogma coming through the wall.

“Ah, Russell!” he said, his face lighting up. “I was just on my way to meet our guests: I presume you were doing the same?”

Russell nodded. His throat felt clogged, but he smiled a little, and walked the rest of the way with Dogma happily talking about a fascinating tapestry he’d found in the loft the other day.

All talk of tapestries, fascinating or otherwise, was cut off when Russell opened the door into the reception room and Dogma floated through the wall (a preference of his, even when doors were available). Yumi was lounging on a sofa, twirling a hat that definitely wasn’t hers on one phalange, and her jaw-bones twisted into a fairly decent imitation of a grin when she saw the two of them.

Raymond and Walter were sitting on another sofa; only one of them looked at home in the reception room, with its tall bookcases and bordering-on-rococo furniture. Raymond practically leapt up when he saw Russell, and came over to ruffle his hair with a “How’re you doing, kid?”

In the gilt bordering of a nearby table, the Informant mimed marking off a third tally.

“Walter, I’m gonna go take a walk, I think,” Raymond said, looking back at Walter, who seemed totally uninterested in what he had to say. “You’ll be fine talking about ancient books and whatever, right?”

“Yes,” Walter said icily, and then greeted Dogma in a much warmer tone of voice. Unfazed, Raymond winked at Russell and led him out of the room.

They made it to the front door without any conversation, and Russell began to wonder if that was uncomfortable. Surely, if Raymond wanted to talk, he’d just talk: that was what everyone else did. There wasn’t anything to worry about, but Russell did shoot the Informant a mildly scared look when he passed a vase on the way out. The Informant gestured wildly, but the reflection was too small to work out what he was trying to get across.

It was freezing outside. Raymond didn’t seem to notice it – he only shoved his hands into pockets and breathed out to admire the whiteness of his own breath. He didn’t say anything as they walked down to the garden. That being the case, Russell didn’t talk either, least of all to complain about his lack of proper winter wear.

It had been raining, luckily. There were still drops every so often, which were a shock, but it meant that the garden path was potholed with silvery puddles, and the Informant looked up at him from every one as he and Raymond strolled through the hydrangea walk.

“You could ask him what happened to his hat,” the Informant suggested, still in his Russell-only voice.

It wasn’t a bad suggestion. As they passed the first huge bush of watercolour-blue hydrangeas, Russell looked up.

“Was that your hat Yumi was playing with?” he asked quietly.

“Hmm?” Raymond looked down as if he was surprised to see Russell there. “Oh. Yeah, that was mine. Don’t usually lend it out, but hey, who am I to refuse a beautiful woman? Even if she’s also a skeleton.”

Russell nodded, feigning understanding. In a nearby puddle, the Informant gave him an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Around them, several raindrops fell on nearby hydrangea leaves with slight plinking sounds. The smell of fresh rain was overwhelming.

“Hey, Russell?” Raymond said, hunching his shoulders up. “Probably late to ask this, but you’re happy here, right?”

Russell looked at his boots splashing through puddles; the concern on the Informant’s face splintered into hundreds of ripples.

“I’m happy,” he said.

“Even though none of them are human? We could do something, you know. The higher-ups seem to be fine with leaving the rest of them here if they’re harmless, but you’re…a different case.”

He always was.

“He doesn’t mean it like that,” the Informant said firmly. “You belong here. He’s not saying you don’t.”

As if the Informant knew. Well, reasonably speaking, he probably did, or at least better than Russell knew. But still.

Raymond went on, “I’m just saying…if now, or at any time, you feel uncomfortable here, we’ve got resources for this kind of thing. We can take care of it.” He wasn’t looking at Russell, but rather straight up at the cloud-blanketed sky. Avoidance, but Russell was toying with avoidance too. He stared at the mud his boots were squishing through.

“I’m fine,” he said.

A short pause. Then Raymond nodded and said, “If you’re okay, then that’s cool. We can get the proposal through anyway just fine, no worries.”

He grinned at Russell, and though he seemed like a different person without his hat, his smile was unmistakable. Russell found himself smiling back.

“Well!” Raymond clapped his hands together. “Serious talk’s all well and good, but I’m freezing my balls off here – let’s go back.” He paused. “Uh, excuse the language. And don’t tell anyone I said that in front of you.”

Russell shrugged, since it was nothing compared to how Yumi and Kantera talked when they thought he wasn’t listening, and followed him back to the house gratefully. He couldn’t feel his fingers anymore.

By the time they were within shouting distance, the door was opening and both zombies were coming out in varying states of alarm. Mireille spotted him first. “Russell!” she squeaked, hurrying over to him. “Oh, how could you th- _think_ of going out in this weather without a coat!”

Equally distraught, Tabasa – his leg apparently retrieved – ran over to sling a thick coat over Russell’s shoulders. Russell stood there and let it happen, watching with mild interest as Raymond stood back to let Mireille add a hat and scarf. It had pom-poms. Russell reached up to squeeze one.

“You’re going to get sick!” Tabasa cried in an almost-critical tone. With ice-cold hands he adjusted Russell’s hat, put his arm around Russell’s shoulders, and then both he and Mireille pushed Russell back to the house, glaring daggers at Raymond.

“He wasn’t in _that_ much danger,” Raymond said, but sheepishly, with the air of a man who knows he’s done something wrong.

Mireille huffed. “Please remember that Russell is _human_! He needs to be t-taken care of! His body temperature must be kept stable, and that means no going outside without a coat!”

Russell sent an apologetic look in Raymond’s direction.

Once inside, Cody and Kantera were there to fuss too, and that brought Dogma, Walter and Yumi over so they too could have a go at fretting over Russell or telling Raymond off (by way of a lecture, in Dogma’s case, or with insults so cutting that Russell was surprised Raymond could still smile them off, in Walter’s case). Gardenia made an appearance too, but more to coo over Russell’s hat and try and sneak off with Mireille’s detached hand than to do anything useful.

And none of it was suffocating. It wasn’t unwanted attention, and it wasn’t stitched with the fear that they were all just doing it to get something out of him. It had stopped feeling like that long ago. Russell wasn’t uncomfortable here, in the foyer echoing with voices and laughter (though also lacking in body heat). If anything, this was comfort itself. Russell turned to see both Raymond and Walter smiling in a satisfied way at him.

“See, Russell?” came the Informant’s Russell-only voice from the marble floor. “You belong here. You know that, don’t you?”

Russell didn’t have to agree out loud: the Informant already knew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The always-wonderful nakihime drew [this](https://twitter.com/edgeypoo/status/793455683966476288) from the first scene! It's so lovely...  
> (While we're at it, he also drew [ this ](http://nakihime.tumblr.com/post/152556889935/zombie-tabasa-and-vampire-gardenia-wish-u-a-happy) for this au, and it's similarly perfect)


	3. My Blood For Yours

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A small chapter to set things up for the next one. If it feels like this whole thing is exposition, that's...well, yeah. It is.
> 
> This chapter: Gardenia and Walter and experiments (but not really).

“Now, you’re sure you don’t mind?”

Gardenia sighed dramatically. “ _Yes_ , Walter, I’m _very sure_ that I don’t mind, since this is like the fifth time you’ve done this.”

Walter made something that might have been a pout, but he was an adult, so it probably wasn’t. An adult-pout, then. Either way, he just said, “Verbal consent is important in these kinds of experiments.”

Gardenia nodded without really listening, holding her arm out so he could start doing that thing with the scalpel and timer and gauze (and occasionally weird vials of funny-coloured liquids) that he did whenever he came over. She didn’t really care what it was: it seemed to help him, and it wasn’t going to hurt her. Very little hurt vampires, apart from the big things, like bright sunlight.

The sunlight thing was kind of annoying, though.

While Walter started to draw some of not-really-her blood, she looked away, scanning over the uninspiring decoration in this particular guest room. It wasn’t one of her favourites. It was filled with old stuff nobody else wanted, like stuffed deer heads and sculptures that were probably very expensive but looked awful. What she wouldn’t give for a good tapestry rather than one of those oddly muscular cherubs.

It was getting too quiet. Everyone was downstairs, and all she could hear was the odd rustle or clink of unnamed instruments in Walter’s research case. She didn’t like it.

“How’s the leniency proposal going?” she asked, still looking around the room. The wainscoting wasn’t bad, she decided.

“It’s going,” Walter replied in a distracted way. He was writing something down in his notepad. “I doubt it’ll go through any time soon, but that also means that they likely won’t take any action that will harm you until then. No, I misspoke: they’re unlikely to take that kind of action at all. I’m sure they’d have preferred Russell to come into our custody, but it shouldn’t be a deal-breaker.”

“Do they only care because he’s a kid?”

“I suppose so.”

“Then don’t they care about me?”

Walter looked up from his notepad and she grinned at him, making it clear she was joking. She didn’t mind one bit if his snooty bosses didn’t care that she existed. They could all push off.

Clearly satisfied that he didn’t have to soothe any hurt feelings, Walter went back to his notes. “I imagine they saw that you were a vampire and decided that meant they didn’t have to treat you as they would a human child. Russell’s a rather different case.” He put the notepad down on a nearby desk, balancing it on a music box.

“Because he’s human,” she said, for lack of anything else to say.

“Well, yes. He _is_ human, isn’t he? I’m sure we asked before, but it still seems so odd that a human child would be out here in the middle of nowhere with, well, all of you.”

“Oh, he’s definitely human. I mean, he’s got the Informant, but he’s still human. It might be better if he weren’t, though, I guess.”

Walter nodded, bringing his roll of scalpels out. Gardenia looked away again.

“Have you ever…” Walter started, and paused to cut into her skin. “Has there ever been any talk of…you know. Making him not-human.”

“Um…a few times, yeah. Obviously it never came to anything, but Yumi and Mireille and Kantera have discussed it a couple of times. Kantera biting him, I mean. But they’d never do it without his permission,” she hurried to clarify, “and he was kind of, uh…ambivalent, I guess, about it at the start. Like, he didn’t care one way or the other. But he was a bit different back then. Anyway, the Informant refused pretty violently, and Russell followed his lead, so nothing’s happened.”

It was for the best, the way she saw it. Russell had plenty of time to make up his mind, and she wouldn’t have wished the crossing process on anyone. It hurt worse than anything, and on top of all the nasty little side effects, you didn’t get your memory back properly for _decades_. Even Kantera said he couldn’t remember all of his human life yet.

Walter dabbed at her arm with a swab. “From what I’ve heard of him, it surprises me that the Informant would be violent about anything. _Can_ he be violent?”

“Uh, he can…he can do some things…” Gardenia grimaced. Her arm was stinging. “It’s not very nice, anyway. But you’re right: he’s usually very good-tempered! He’s a lot of fun to talk to, and he’s great to play cards with and stuff as long as you’re not sitting in front of something reflective. Oh, he tells Russell which cards to play,” she explained. “So really, he only gets violent sometimes, but he’s definitely not a danger to anyone,” she said firmly. Walter was nice – and she guessed Raymond was too – but it still didn’t hurt to be careful, even if it was stretching the truth a bit. “And honestly, I’d get angry more than him if I was stuck in mirrors my whole life.”

“That’s true,” Walter said, noting something down. “I’d like to meet him sometime.”

“Oh, you probably will! He says that it usually takes a little while for humans to start noticing him, but they get there!”

“He has experience with humans other than Russell?”

Gardenia didn’t gulp or do anything to show her momentary panic, because she was older than she looked (though not by much) and she wasn’t that naïve. And they’d practiced this. So she said, “Just a bit! Back when Russell was a baby.”

Nodding, Walter went back to his notes, and Gardenia almost breathed out in relief. Thank goodness for Yumi’s briefing sessions on how to deal with outsiders.

Those sessions _had_ made her feel a little uncomfortable, though. They still did. The idea that none of them could be totally honest with outsiders didn’t sit well with her, and she felt something bitter bulging in her throat. She had to look away from Walter’s bent head to swallow it down.

It made sense, of course, given how Dreamsend needed them to be models of safety and low risk in order to let them keep living the way they were, but it seemed so…dishonest, she supposed. But that was the point.

Some things had to be kept hidden, apparently, whether she understood it or not.

“Gardenia,” Walter said, and she stiffened, but not by much. She was better than that.

“Yeah?”

He looked up at her, bringing out a stopwatch and turning it over in one hand. “Would you like to come to the Dreamsend office?”

All thoughts of deception and unease left her mind like dust blown from a mantelpiece. “ _Could_ I?”

“Can’t you? If we choose an overcast day and keep you in cars or under your parasol the whole time, it should be alright, shouldn’t it? And Raymond should know what to do if anything bad happens to you.”

“Well yeah, that’s all fine, obviously!” Of course that wasn’t what was holding her back: she’d willingly run out in full sunlight if it meant she’d get to go into the city. “I mean more…is that okay? Won’t your bosses get angry?”

“No, I don’t believe so. I’d like to show you and Russell to them, actually. Just to prove how harmless you really are.”

Gardenia nodded so enthusiastically that her whole body moved, the chair legs squeaking. “Yeah! Oh my gosh, yeah! You should definitely do that! We’d love to come!”

Walter smiled, his expression softening. “I’ll speak about it with the others, then.”

“Oh no, you shouldn’t do that!”

A single eyebrow lifted.

“I mean,” –she searched frantically for an excuse, anything to keep him from mentioning it to Yumi– “they’ve been really antsy over this whole Dreamsend thing. They’d all just think it’s too dangerous, and I mean, you’ve _seen_ how protective they are of Russell, right? They’d never let him out.” She knew that for a fact. “But it’s a good idea! And you need us to prove we’re not dangerous, right? And Russell’ll want to come, so we should do it as a day trip, just us four! Well, five with the Informant, I guess.”

“Gardenia, I’m not sure I’m comfortable doing this without permission from the others. They’re technically his guardians.” He was stern now, and she was terrified she’d ruined it all.

Her mind raced. There had to be some way…right? Or someone who wouldn’t be too uptight about it…

“Oh! You can ask Tabasa!” she said.

“Why Tabasa alone?” Everything about his expression conveyed total distrust. That was researchers for you. Never biddable.

“Because Tabasa’s _fun_ ,” she grinned. “He won’t be so strict about this kind of thing. And he counts as Russell’s guardian, right?”

She could almost see the words seep into Walter’s mind, unravelling whatever weak stubborn front he was putting up. Of course he wanted them to go. She wanted them to go. Now they just had to get rid of those pesky morals of his.

“Well,” he said, looking down at the stopwatch and picking up a syringe. “I’ll think about it, at any rate. It all depends on whether Russell wants to go, of course.”

“Oh, he will!”

Walter nodded, and then the conversation was finished as he got back to his experiments, and Gardenia was almost totally satisfied with her victory. And it _was_ a victory, though it might take a few days to get there. And then she’d finally get to go into the city! It was so exciting: she was going to take pictures of _everything_ , and speak to new people, and while she didn’t think she’d get to go sightseeing or anything, it was still going to be great. Even going to a dusty old office was going to be great! After all, she hadn’t been out in the human world since-

Since…

When _was_ the last time, anyway? All she could remember was when her dad had been there on her birthday, and he’d…

Gardenia shook her head, clearing it. It didn’t matter. It’d come back to her eventually.


	4. Beasts That Run Wild in the Wood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This series really wasn't supposed to be anything more than the first chapter. Oh dear.

It probably wasn’t a good idea.

“You’ve done it now,” the Informant said airily from the car window. Russell wanted to reply – something like ‘you didn’t say no when Gardenia was pleading with us either’ – but there were three other people in the car, so he just glared at his reflection.

The Informant sighed, scenery flying through him. “I don’t think you should be doing this.”

‘ _Then you should have stopped me_ ,’ Russell didn’t say.

“Don’t look at me like that, Russell. You know I couldn’t have stopped you. For a start, I physically can’t, and then…” he looked away with an air of guilt. “You want to go, don’t you? You want to leave the estate. I can’t really blame you. I can’t, and I don’t want to see you upset, so…” He swallowed.

Russell turned away from the window, sinking into the smooth faux-leather of the car seats. It smelt funny. Did all cars smell like this? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in one. Gardenia was probably the same: she was almost jumping in her seat, staring out of the window with wide eyes and pestering Raymond with as many questions as she could get out.

“Well, yeah, of course I can fly if I _want_ to,” she was saying dismissively. “What, can’t you? You’re not missing out on much, really: it’s not that nice turning into a bat. Everything goes all cramped and while you’re not really blind, it takes a lot of getting used to. Really, you’re better off not turning into one at all.”

Raymond made a noise that might have been an attempt at a laugh but mostly sounded bitter.

“Anyway, what I was– _ooh_! What’s that?!” She pressed her face up against the window and Russell peered out to see what she was looking at, both of them straining against their seatbelts.

Raymond looked out too. “That’s, uh. That’s just a bunch of big stores. Like outlets?”

“But they’re so huge! I didn’t know shops got that big!”

“They don’t usually, but on the outskirts of cities you sometimes get hubs of these things, with gas stations and places to eat and stuff.”

“They’re more about convenience than being attractive, hence the petrol stations,” Walter added, pulling into a particularly sticky junction. Russell could see him frowning in the mirror, but the Informant was looking back, so he looked away quickly.

“Have you kids really never seen one of these places before?” Raymond asked, turning to look at the back seats. “Seriously? They’re not new or anything.”

“We don’t leave the settlement much,” Gardenia said, apparently still captivated by the Ikea they were driving past.

Raymond looked at her for a moment longer, said, “Huh,” and turned back to the front. Russell closed his eyes. It was a pity, because he wanted to see the city too, but his skull felt like it was trying to crush his brain. Gardenia had noticed his discomfort earlier, and that had led to a discussion that eventually told him he had what they called car sickness, but he didn’t feel sick. His head just hurt, that was all. Maybe that was what car sickness was.

The journey passed relatively smoothly after that. Eventually, he felt well enough to open his eyes and stare out at the houses passing by them. He didn’t focus on anything, because if he did that then he knew he’d see the Informant again. Of course he would. That’s what the Informant was for: always being with him. And that was fine, but he didn’t want to be stared at so sadly, not when it just made him feel guilty for doing this one thing that he’d felt he maybe wanted to do, even if it went against what Yumi, Kantera and Mireille had always told him.

One trip couldn’t hurt. They wouldn’t be seen, and they’d be under Dreamsend’s protection, and it was going to be _fine_.

He slumped in his seat, closing his eyes again. He still felt guilty.

It didn’t take much longer until they reached the offices. Russell knew, because Gardenia shook him, calling his name excitedly before almost jumping out of the car.

“Gardenia!” Raymond called after her, grabbing her parasol and running after her. Russell sat for a little longer, wondering if his headache was going to fade. It didn’t seem to want to.

“Maybe you shouldn’t go inside,” the Informant said in a small voice.

Russell didn’t reply.

“Russell, are you alright?” Walter opened his car door, looking in on him with a worried expression. “Does your head still hurt?”

Russell shrugged, undoing his seatbelt and getting out of the car. His boots splashed in a puddle. They were all over the car park: it had rained, and looked like it was going to rain again any second. Hence why Gardenia could run around without her parasol, much as Raymond was trying to push it on her.

“Car sickness sometimes takes a little while to go away,” Walter said in what was probably meant to be a soothing voice. Russell nodded, hoping that would put an end to the conversation, and followed him towards the building that towered in front of the car park. He didn’t feel much better, but Walter knew about these things, so he just concentrated on not giving away how sick he actually felt.

The other two – Gardenia now holding her parasol as if she’d never been without it in her life – were waiting for them by the doors. Gardenia was tapping her foot, more excited than impatient, but Raymond looked distinctly put out. Walter smirked at him.

“Automatic door still won’t work for you?” he asked and, without waiting for an answer, walked through the doors which opened for him graciously. Raymond sent a filthy look after him, seemed to think of something, and hurried to catch him up so they could bicker about it. Russell fell into step with Gardenia, both too intent on staring at every part of the office to talk.

It was modern, Russell supposed. Modern and shiny, with people in suits staring at them whenever they passed rooms that had glass walls. There was a lot to take in, and Russell kept looking around as they followed Raymond and Walter. Water coolers and coffee machines dotted the corridors, and the carpets were all an offensively ugly grey colour. There were a truly unnecessary number of potted plants, too. Nobody needed that many ficuses.

It got more and more difficult to concentrate as they climbed up to higher floors. His headache wasn’t going away: it was like all his blood was pooling around his brain, pounding it into submission or something just as distracting. More than once, dizziness threatened to make him lose his balance. The Informant kept staring back at him from all the glass panels, all the metal finishing, as if he was pleading with Russell.

“Russell, are you okay?”

He looked over at Gardenia. She was halfway up the stairs, twirling her parasol absent-mindedly.

“I’m fine,” he said, and gave her a quick smile.

“You’re such a liar.”

It took him a moment to realise that she hadn’t been the one to say it – it was just the Informant. Russell stared down at the stairs as they walked up them. He could barely hear anything properly now – all sound was peaking and fading erratically in his ears. He resisted the urge to breathe through his mouth, as if it would make a difference either way.

He wondered if he should tell someone.

They reach the fourth floor. Russell felt faint: he didn’t pay attention as they walked through the door Walter opened for them, and so it took a few seconds to register when everything suddenly went dark.

Blinking, Russell looked up.

They were in a forest, inexplicably. More importantly, Russell’s headache had disappeared as if it had never existed. He looked around at the others: everyone looked confused, most of all Walter, with his hand still resting on the handle that now looked like solid stone, a single door standing in the middle of dark, twisting trees. Russell felt a shock of cold on his shoulder: it had started to rain.

Gardenia let her parasol fall. “What’s going on?”

 

*

 

Mireille knew she wasn’t the best at letting things be. She tended to worry too much, and when she worried she got a little…possessive, might be the best word. She wanted to take everything she cared about and cling it all to her chest so nothing bad could happen.

It was thus quite a shock to her system when she went to check on Russell, mostly to ask if he’d like her to make him something to eat, only to find that he wasn’t in his room.

“Are you certain?” Kantera asked, putting his mortar and pestle down.

Mireille tried to catch her breath, holding onto the door frame. “I…I checked everywhere! He’s not there, and if he’s n-not there, then I don’t…I don’t know where he _could_ be!”

Kantera got up, sweeping out of the room, and Mireille followed hurriedly. The older stitches in her legs were giving out, but she couldn’t care.

With Cody and Dogma’s help, it took an hour to check the entire house and confirm that Russell (and Gardenia, vexingly) was missing. It took half an hour to find Yumi and explain it all to her. It took fifteen minutes more until they thought to ask Tabasa, and then to find him out in the gardens. She could have slapped him when he told them what had happened, but of course he didn’t _know_ – he’d had no idea, so it was only natural that he hadn’t thought there was anything to stop Russell leaving the estate.

By the time they’d gathered the whole story, Russell had been out for upwards of three hours, and there was really nothing they could do by that point.

 

*

 

The forest didn’t seem to end. There were clearings, but they all looked the same: openings for milky moonlight to pour into, lighting the growing puddles up like silver plates on the forest floor. No one really knew what to do, since the four of them had been walking around for at least an hour without finding anything, unless the door counted. They’d found that, repeatedly. It still wouldn’t open.

“What are we going to _do_?” Gardenia said, though it didn’t look like she expected an answer. She was staring up at the moon, twirling her parasol nervously. Walter and Raymond were off searching again, and they’d left Gardenia and Russell with strict instructions not to move.

Russell could do that. He sat on a mossy tree stump, trying to ignore how damp it was, and stared down at the puddle in between his feet.

“Well, this is a situation,” the Informant said, probably purposefully bland. Russell was almost totally certain that the Informant was only pretending to be calm. “Maybe leaving the estate wasn’t such a good idea. What do you think?”

Russell didn’t know. Was he in the wrong for taking the opportunity? Probably.

“I’m not trying to get you to admit that you shouldn’t have gone against their orders. Or not orders, I suppose…warnings, maybe. You’re the one who should decide whether you need to follow those or not. I’m just here to make sure you ask yourself the right questions.”

Did he really have to? Surely he could survive just fine without wondering about everything. Russell rested his chin in a hand, gently touching the puddle with his foot so ripples started to spread across it.

“Don’t do that: it’s rude. Anyway. If you’d rather not think about it, then that’s fine.” He smiled grimly. “Things will probably get rather interesting here soon, anyway.”

Russell decided that the Informant was definitely acting. Russell wasn’t going to question how he knew what was going on, or why he wouldn’t be straight with Russell (he never was), but the calm was faked. It had to be, or the Informant was a very different person to who Russell thought he was.

But with the Informant, that wasn’t as far-fetched a thought as it might have been.

In the middle of the clearing, Gardenia began to splash through puddles in an anxious way, and Russell sighed into his hand, watching the Informant. He hoped it would all get ‘interesting’ sooner rather than later.

“Now, Russell, can you promise me something?” the Informant asked. “Promise me that you won’t lose your head. No matter what happens, you’ll be fine. You just need to accept everything. _Accept it_ , alright? None of this is a lie, so all you can do is accept it.”

Did he enjoy being so vague? But it was the Informant – of course he enjoyed it. Vagueness was his element.

Russell nodded in agreement, and the Informant smiled. He actually looked at ease for a moment, and he opened his mouth to say something else, but was interrupted by a scream.

Both Russell and Gardenia’s heads snapped up, and Russell got to his feet. The scream echoed around them too wildly to tell where it had come from. They could barely see five paces out of the clearing into the cramped mass of trees, but they looked anyway, moving closer together.

“That was…” Gardenia whispered, folding her parasol down and holding it out like a weapon.

Russell nodded. Definitely Walter’s voice.

More sound followed, but everything was dim and distant, though they should have been able to hear everything given how quiet the forest was. Half-syllables, the cut-off end of a roar, Raymond calling Walter’s name. Gardenia shivered.

“Do you think we should go and find them?” she asked, her voice a whisper. “It sounds…” She trailed off, staring ahead of her. Russell did the same, transfixed.

There was something coming through the trees, visible only by the grey fog seeping off it. Vaguely humanoid, but not quite there, with arms that stretched to its feet and ended in feeler-like things rather than hands, and rather than any features, it only had five huge eyes – two on its face, three on its torso, stacked one on top of the other. The eyes were twitching – looking back and forth, glistening in the moonlight – but the rest of the thing’s body was as wispy as a shadow. It approached them slowly, jumpily, like it was taking miniscule steps but every movement was too fast for human eyes to see.

There was something about it that sent dread shooting through Russell’s legs until they shook.

He couldn’t tear his eyes from it, so he heard rather than saw Gardenia move forwards. One step at a time, dragging her feet over the muddy ground, she walked towards the thing, and said in a choked voice, “Dad?”

Russell stared, eyes flicking between Gardenia and the creature. No matter how he looked, he couldn’t see it as anything but menacing.

“It’s not her father,” the Informant explained. His voice sounded dull, almost inaudible over the low thudding and high-pitched whining the creature brought with it. “That’s only what she sees. Accept this, Russell.” His voice broke as he said Russell’s name, and when Russell glanced down at a nearby reflection, the Informant wasn’t facing him. He turned back.

“Dad?” Gardenia said, swallowing heavily. She was reaching out one trembling hand. “Hey, Dad, what are you…why are you here? You’re… Dad? I don’t…I don’t understand… Dad, I…”

She was almost at the creature, and it sank in that if Russell didn’t do anything, she’d touch it: he realised that she honestly had no idea what it really looked like. Or what it looked like to him. Whichever it was, he found himself leaping forwards, grabbing her arm and trying to pull her back.

Her eyes were blank when she looked at him. “You…”

He dropped her wrist. His fingers felt numb. “Gardenia?”

“ _You_.” Her pupils narrowed to slits, her fangs lengthening and her mouth widening unnaturally until he could see the rows and rows of pointed teeth inside.

“You,” she said again, her voice hoarse. “Why would you…? It was you, it was you, it was _you_ , Russell. It’s so painful, it hurts so much, it hurts it hurts it hurts _it hurts_!” She lifted her hands to her face, scraping sharpened claws down her skin.

Russell stepped back, stumbling over a puddle but unable to look away.

“ _Why would you do that?!_ ” she screamed. “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, I’m flying! I’m flying and it’s so scary, it’s so scary Russell, I’m so scared, I-!” She grabbed his shoulders, staring at him with crazed eyes. “It’s so scary! I want my dad, I don’t want this, I don’t want it to hurt anymore!”

Shaking, Russell broke away, and he couldn’t even feel the pain when her claws ripped into his skin. He backed off, staring at Gardenia as she sunk to her knees. She was sobbing, wailing: “Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me…”

Russell’s chest clenched. He couldn’t think, could hardly breathe, and all the breath he had was sucked out of him when he turned to see the creature standing right behind him. He tried to run, but tripped, falling to the ground and scraping his palms. It didn’t matter: he scrambled backwards, away from the creature as it came closer and closer, like it was just toying with him. When he backed into a tree, there was nothing to do but stare up and watch as it loomed over him.

All he could see were shadows and eyes – unblinking, judging him.

“ _YOU CAN RUN FROM ME BUT YOU CAN NEVER RUN FROM YOUR SIN_.” The words were like waves crashing inside his head. Russell could feel that his mouth was open, his eyes so wide it hurt, but he couldn’t move. There was pain everywhere, slicing through his skull, and he could remember, he could remember, he _remembered_ …

“Russell!” The Informant’s voice – a drop of ink in a tidal wave. “Russell, please, you have to accept it! You have to remember! You have to understand, or you’ll never… Russell, _please_!”

Everything was too loud. Russell felt his eyelids droop, pushed by some fatigue he couldn’t feel, and then darkness came over him.


	5. Bored by the Trial of Living

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter: Raymond, fighting, and fatigue. 
> 
> (A little violent, and the fight itself was intentionally written as invasive and uncomfortable)

Raymond had no idea what they were going to do, since they were stuck in a godforsaken pile of trees that _just never ended_ , but he was feeling pretty calm, all things considered. Things could have been worse. It wasn’t like any of them were hurt, and they were dodging the bullet of having to show the kids to the Dreamsend bosses, so that was nice.

Walter, of course, had never been gifted with positivity.

He wasn’t saying anything, but he’d almost tripped over stray roots about ten times in the last half hour, and since they’d left the kids behind, he’d been stalking around the gloomy forest, muttering under his breath like he sometimes did close to a deadline. Raymond followed behind, hands in his pockets and eyes on Walter’s feet so he – with his significantly better night vision – could at least see when he was going to trip next.

That turned out to be approximately two minutes later, and Raymond stuck out an arm again, was thanked absent-mindedly again, and decided that enough was enough.

“Hey, Walter.”

Walter didn’t stop, but Raymond hadn’t expected him to.

“I don’t think we’re going to find anything. Just walking around isn’t going to–”

“So what,” Walter snarled, turning around, “do you have a better idea? Any sparks of genius? If so, I’d love to hear them, because otherwise we’re just going to return empty-handed!” His expression was twisted into anger, he was breathing heavily, and Raymond almost took a step back. Clearly he’d underestimated the situation.

“If there’s nothing to find, there’s nothing to find,” he said.

“There _has_ to be something to find!” Walter shouted, his body shaking with the effort, briefly. He looked like he wanted to say something more, but instead he grimaced and turned away, stalking through the trees. Raymond watched him go, watched him as he was lit up at irregular intervals when he stepped through pools of moonlight.

It was such a fucking pain. Walter was always like this: he got stressed and lost his head, and then you couldn’t reason with him even if you tried. He was so, so annoying. Was it too much to ask that he just took a step back and breathed for a second? Seriously? What was _wrong_ with him? It wasn’t like this was his fault. It wasn’t like there was anything to find anyway.

Raymond scowled. A moment later, he jogged after Walter’s back.

“Walter,” he called, letting as much as annoyance as reasonably possible slip into his voice.

Walter walked faster.

“Walter! Don’t be like this!” He rolled his eyes, though there was no one around to admire it, and swore when he realised a branch had just snagged his shirt.

Fed up with the situation but uninterested in ripping what was probably one of his favourite shirts, he stopped walking to untangle it. He’d barely even touched it before something swept through him – a wave of deep, raw dread. It sent goosebumps down his body, choking him, and freezing him in place momentarily. His fingers were trembling; he clenched them and looked up, about to ask if Walter had felt it too.

But Walter was in no position to answer.

The dread came back, colder and sharper this time, shooting through Raymond’s gut like arrows. His eyes widened, his jaw clenching as he saw the _thing_ – not human, and no undead he’d ever heard of – approaching Walter with erratic, jerky steps. It must have gone right by Raymond, and its humanoid-but-not body was smoky and transparent enough that he could see right through it. Right through, straight to the fear on Walter’s face.

Raymond ripped away from the tree, but he was ten metres away and panic was pounding through him: he stumbled, and no super-human speed could get him to Walter before the creature did. His damned vampire eyes saw everything unfold despite the dark: the creature reaching out an arm, smoke wrapping around Walter’s throat, holding him up until he was suspended in the air. There was a brief moment of terror before the creature flung Walter to the side like his fragile human body was a doll’s: he slammed into a tree, and then sight didn’t matter because all Raymond knew was the pained, broken cry that didn’t sound like Walter’s voice at all.

It was, though. It was, and Raymond could feel all reason leave him in favour of visceral rage. It wasn’t controllable, because instincts generally weren’t. There were only urges: to run, to rip, to bite, to howl in fury and pain as his fangs pushed out, as his skin dried to the texture of paper. He leapt at the creature, but it didn’t even flinch: he couldn’t bite it, and whenever he tried to grab it, what solidity it had faded away like smoke on the breeze. He wanted to fight, he wanted to kill, he wanted to tear the fucking thing in half, but nothing he did had any effect on it. All he could do was roar and let his instincts eat into his reason, and still nothing happened.

The impotence was enough to drive him mad. Dissatisfaction raged through him with every attack, but what did that matter? The creature stood there with its back to him, and Walter stayed unconscious beside them. He was as useless as a puppet with all its strings shaken, and his speed and strength meant nothing, since he’d already failed to protect what he should have. Tears sprung to his eyes as he leapt at the creature again (and again, and again), his movements growing sloppier each time in desperation. And then the creature turned around.

Before he could run, smoke flowed into him through his mouth and nose. It pushed itself into his lungs in pulses, choking him until he fell to his knees, and then all he could do was curl up on the ground and gag, blood dripping out of his mouth from where his fangs had pushed their way out of the gums.

Hatred and wretched futility burned him; he looked up to see five giant eyes watching him emotionlessly. The creature reached out a shadowy arm, wrapping it around his throat, and he couldn’t grip it to pull it off. It tightened around his neck, tendrils forcing their way down his throat until all he could smell, or taste, or breathe was the creature. He choked – saliva and blood spattered on the forest floor.

Without warning, the creature pulled back. The smoke receded with a sickening wrench through Raymond’s lungs that left him heaving over the ground, and when he’d recovered enough to look up, it was gone.

He stared. Every part of his body felt raw and used, his anger had flared and rotted into bitterness, but he could barely believe it had happened at all. But it had. Walter was proof of that.

Walter.

There was no time to lick his wounds and wounded pride: he pushed himself off the ground with muscles that still shivered from adrenaline, wiped his mouth with the back of a hand, and walked over to Walter. His body was slumped against the tree, his eyes closed and blood dripping down the back of his head. His left arm was twisted at an angle Raymond was almost certain wasn’t natural. That wasn’t good. Walter was going to hate that.

“Walter.” He crouched down, still breathing heavily. He felt thoroughly exhausted, which wasn’t a good sign. Speaking with his fangs fully out was awkward, and there was a clammy, cloying taste in his mouth that he couldn’t get out no matter how much he swallowed. “Walter.”

No response, which wasn’t surprising. Raymond stood up and bent down to pick Walter up. It was more difficult than it should have been, but eventually Walter was comfortably in his arms, and everything seemed almost normal. It wasn’t, of course. Walter would never have let himself be carried normally.

Raymond stared down at his closed eyes for a moment, then shifted his weight so Walter’s head was resting against his chest rather than lolling backwards. And then he walked.

He didn’t know how he knew where the creature had gone, except that there was a chill that almost seemed to thrum in the air like an invisible path. With any luck, or lack thereof, it would have gone to the kids, and that meant he had to go there too. But he felt no particular hurry, or anything, really. There was mostly fatigue, and numbness, and stiffness in his face that felt as if it would never let him smile.

He hated this. With every step, he hated it. He hated being humiliated and beaten into the ground by a monster he couldn’t even touch properly. He hated not knowing what it was or what it wanted, and he hated the fear pounding in his chest. It was all such a fucking pain and he didn’t want anything to do with it – if he’d applied to Dreamsend, it was because he needed the money, and even then he’d never signed up to fight anything like this. He _hated_ it. He wanted to get the fuck away from this fucking deserted forest, from that fucking _thing_ , from everything.

His steps on the ground, crunching partially-dry leaves, were the only noise in the entire forest. He stopped walking for a second, and looked down. Walter was dead weight in his arms, still bleeding softly into his sleeves, and just looking at him brought up such desperate, keening frustration that Raymond had to close his eyes.

He had no idea what was wrong, or what to do, or how to deal with humans so weak they’d pass out just because they’d been thrown against a tree. There was resentment too – how fucking _dare_ he do this again? – but mostly there was just fear. Fear wherever he turned, whatever he thought about, because he couldn’t run away.

Sometimes bad things happened, and all he could see was how little he wanted to be involved in it, how he should have left ages ago, but it was too late for all of that because he was carrying something precious to him right in his arms and he couldn’t run away now.

It was such a fucking pain.

It took too long to find the first clearing. He wandered around for longer than he could afford, losing patience with every tiny piece of scenery he recognised, because he was running out of time. Humans didn’t last that long once they were hurt, and he had no idea how the kids were holding up. He made mistakes, got lost, and the only reason he found his way back at all was because he caught the sound of someone’s voice calling out. He recognised it, and ran towards it.

The sight that met him when he did find the clearing didn’t exactly fill him with anything nearing relief. The door looked significantly less stone-like and more openable than it had before, true, but Gardenia was curled up, mumbling some kind of mantra, and Russell was unconscious on the ground. In a puddle right by his face, his reflection was calling for him.

“Russell! Russell, please, you have to wake up, you _have_ to!” he pleaded, his face so close to the surface of the puddle that it looked like he might breach it. “You can’t run away from this now! I want you to, I want you to so _badly_ , but you can’t – you need to wake up! Russell, _please_!”

Raymond walked over, and the reflection caught sight of him. He looked just like Russell, but couldn’t be, not with tears in his eyes and terror in his face.

“Wake him up,” he said, gulping. “He’ll…he’ll be fine, but please, wake him up.”

 Raymond closed his eyes. He was so tired, and so on edge. Why did he have to be looked at like he was some kind of saviour on top of all that? He couldn’t do it. How dare they expect him to do it?

But he looked around – to Gardenia, still collapsed and sobbing quietly; to Russell, unconscious; to Walter, who hung in his arms as if lifeless.

There wasn’t anyone else, and he couldn’t run away. So he squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, held Walter tighter, and bent down to prop Russell up so he could wake him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's the end of the chapters I had a good mental image of, so I'm not sure when/if I'll get around to writing more for this au. (It did just start as an excuse for a vampire kink fic, but I'm also a little attached to it, so I'll _probably_ end up writing more)


	6. Needles Sew and Worries Weave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a lot of references to sex (and Kantera/Tabasa, and Mireille/Yumi) without actually being about sex.   
> Also, the 'vampires go into heat' thing is a reference to this series' side-story (totally skippable and very explicit): I don't actually think vampires would go into heats. Why would they do that? It's nonsense. It just makes for good porn.
> 
> Anyway, this chapter: Kantera and some other people and a lot of random jokes me and mars/nakihime kept coming up with. Also taxes. Pay your taxes, please.

It was not an ideal situation to be in. If Kantera was perfectly honest, and he did like to be honest with himself, he would rather be out in full sunlight than in a dusty drawing room, listening as Mireille taught him to sew. That in itself wasn’t the problem: sewing was a noble art, and if he weren’t dedicated to other past-times, he might have considered taking it up. The problem was, rather, why learning to sew had become something of a necessity for him.

Mireille pursed her lips, looking over the stitches he’d done on the piece of canvas she’d given him. It was odd, to feel quite so nervous for her feedback. But she nodded, gave it back to him, and looked up with a pained expression on her face.

To be perfectly accurate, the pained expression had not left her face since he’d walked into the room.

“I th-think that should be alright,” she said. “Your stitches are clumsy, but if it’s just sewing on, um, pieces that have fallen off, that should be fine. You should practice on the real thing now though.” With that said, and without blinking, she reached into her sewing bag for a pair of scissors, and cut through the stitches holding her elbow together. Her forearm fell to the ground with a mildly sickening thump; she picked it up, held it in place, and looked up at him.

“Are you asking me to sew on your arm?” he asked.

“Of c-course I am. It’s not very difficult, but you need to get a feel for it. There are already holes, so it should be easy.”

Intensely discomfited, Kantera moved to the edge of his seat, threaded his needle again, and began to sew.

The room was oppressively quiet. There was an ancient cuckoo clock ticking to one side, but otherwise the thick stone walls muffled all sound and they were left with the unforgiving silence that hung between them. It was not, Kantera thought, entirely his fault. He was not doing anything wrong, per se, but rather accepting an existing risk and learning how to handle it. He did not deserve to be held in disdain because his lover happened to have a body that didn’t naturally stand up to…strenuous exercise. Scarves only went so far in holding Tabasa’s body together, and Mireille had begun to get suspicious after being asked to sew him back together several mornings in a row, so naturally they had done the mature thing and told her.

Considering his current position, Kantera wished they’d used an elaborate lie instead.

“I think…” Mireille started, brushing some of her hair behind an ear that bent at an awkward angle under the weight. “I think you’re doing alright now. You’ll want to be a bit tighter, but overall it’s not bad. B-but, you know,” –she sat up, looking her arm over– “it wouldn’t, um, hurt to be a little, um…gentler. I’m n-not saying that you shouldn’t d-do it at all! But maybe a little, um…finesse wouldn’t be out of place.”

Kantera maintained a placid smile, kept his arms folded in his lap, and dearly wished he could rip something apart. “I quite understand,” he said, his eyes lowered to the rather ugly rug their chairs were on.

“Z-zombies aren’t exactly…robust,” Mireille went on, her stutter notably worse than usual. Probably nerves, Kantera reasoned. He nodded, smiled, and stopped paying attention as she went on to explain what she meant.

The situation was unfortunate, to be sure. It was a source of constant embarrassment for Tabasa, hence why Kantera was making the effort now. They had thought it preferable if at least one of them knew how to sew him back after more intimate damage, after all. And though Mireille was skilled enough to sew herself, Tabasa had pointed out that it might make more sense for Kantera to be the one to learn, since they were both amateurs. Though now he thought about it, it was possible that Tabasa had simply been taking the easy escape.

Either way, neither of them had any intention of stopping. In fact, if one of them was able to sew, a tempting array of options opened up to them. There were plenty of desks and doors in deserted rooms waiting to be used.

“K-kantera, are you listening to me?”

“Why, of course I am.” Kantera met Mireille’s eyes, smiling a little more convincingly, and changed the subject. “At any rate, Mireille, I am deeply grateful that you would do this for me, but I fear I may have to leave soon. Doctor Bartley is coming this afternoon, and I have been warned that he has questions for me.”

The warning had come from Gardenia, who had been warned by Raymond that Walter had been so struck by the revelation that vampires went into heat that he was determined to ask every vampire he knew about it. Though, naturally, since Gardenia was by all accounts still a minor, and Saxon was safely shut up in his coffin upstairs, that meant Kantera and Kantera alone. Gardenia was hiding in her room, but Kantera supposed that was less out of any fear Walter would actually ask her, and more because she was still being punished for her and Russell’s little outing the previous fortnight.

“Is he really a doctor?” Mireille asked, putting away her sewing things.

“It seems so. Academically, you understand, rather than a qualified professional.”

Mireille sniffed. “Well, doctor or not, I can’t say I approve of him being let back in here.”

Kantera agreed, though not without conflict. Walter hadn’t known, of course, and neither he nor Raymond could really be blamed for what had happened. Your heart went out to them, or to one of them, at least. Walter had sent a two-page hand-written letter of apology, and then when Yumi had finally convinced him that he wasn’t banned from the house, he’d appeared and bowed in apology, his head in bandages and his arm in a cast, unable to meet anyone’s eyes.

Raymond – in stark contrast – had laughed, apologised briefly, and gone to see how Russell was doing.

“Yumi _has_ said she has no problem with them being here,” Kantera said carefully, turning a needle in between his fingers. “And I imagine you wouldn’t question her judgement, would you? Are you still… What _is_ the word they’re using nowadays…ah! Are you still crushing on her?”

Mireille spluttered, but no real words came out until she calmed down, started fiddling with the stitches on her neck, and said, “D-don’t _say_ that, please.”

“As you wish.” Kantera smiled. “But surely you can see the wisdom in her choice? We mustn’t burn bridges, my dear.”

“W-well, I know _that_ ,” she protested, looking down to her lap. “It just f-frightens me, that’s all. I don’t know what I’d do if…if it happened again. I don’t even know what d- _did_ happen! I was hoping the other two would remember something, but they weren’t even with the children when it happened, and Gardenia’s no better, and…” she trailed off, looking more despondent than ever.

Kantera tilted his head to the side. “Have you had the opportunity to talk with her, by any chance?”

“Yes… She only remembers that creature and the forest, and the fact that there’s something she’s forgetting.”

“Exactly the same as us, then.”

Mireille nodded miserably. “At least she understands why we can’t let Russell out of the house now. And on that subject, Yumi talked to him, and Russell says he doesn’t remember anything either.”

“He is not, of course, a boy blessed with frankness and candour.”

“Well. Yes. I suppose we’ll just have to trust him, but I don’t like it. I do wish we could talk to the Informant alone, but…”

Kantera nodded. He understood the powerlessness she felt: the need to protect Russell and the others who hadn’t yet ‘remembered’, but also the fear of finding out what they hadn’t quite managed to remember. “That would be ideal, supposing he’s any more honest than Russell is.”

Mireille smiled weakly, and made to get up. Her ankle collapsed beneath her before she could, and she slumped back into the chair, sighing. “I swear these are lasting less and less time… Oh, I’m sorry: you have something to do, don’t you? I r-really shouldn’t have kept you, I’m sorry!”

Kantera shook his head, but got up and, stepping gracefully around the many footstools and boxes piled on the rug, left the room. When he closed the door, he turned back to see Mireille bent over her leg, sewing up her ankle again. She looked very close to tears.

 

The drawing room Walter was in wasn’t difficult to find, because by the time Kantera had walked down to the first floor, he could already hear the shouting. Curious rather than disturbed, he walked along the corridor towards the noise, noting that the candles needed cleaning, and raised a hand in greeting to Tabasa, who was waiting outside the offending room and looking incredibly uncomfortable.

The discomfort melted into a relieved smile when he saw Kantera, and he jogged over to him. “Oh Kantera, thank god,” he said, taking Kantera’s hands in his. “Walter wouldn’t stop asking me these questions about…about nerve endings, and what I can feel, and some really invasive things, but you know what he’s like: I just can’t say no when he’s so _eager_.” He closed his eyes as if pained, wincing when a particularly loud-but-muffled shout came from inside the room. “Anyway, it was terrible. And then Yumi came in to chat, and somehow Walter found out that none of us are paying household tax and I don’t really get it but now he’s super angry and Raymond’s just standing there like he’s a million miles away and Yumi’s in one of her moods because she keeps saying we’re dead so we shouldn’t have to pay tax even though we get the inheritance each month and they won’t stop shouting! I escaped and I don’t think they even noticed because they’re too busy trying to out-argue the other.” He sunk his forehead into Kantera’s chest. “Hell, Yumi hasn’t been like this since the, uh…the book incident.”

The book incident, though best forgotten, was the intensely uncomfortable occasion upon which Cody had found an adult magazine of Yumi’s and told Mireille about it. That would have been rude but nothing more, except that the magazine in question had been entirely zombie-related. Inaccurate, too. Mireille and Tabasa had both been alternately scandalised and horrified, Yumi had defended herself loudly, and Kantera had never been able to remove the tagline – ‘They’re hungry…and they’re _horny_ ’ – from his mind.

Suppressing a shudder, Kantera stroked a hand down Tabasa’s hair. “It sounds awful. Do you think we should leave?”

“Well, I think we should probably try and break it up.”

“You’re so dutiful, Tabasa,” Kantera said, disappointed.

“Don’t say that like it’s a bad thing!” Tabasa straightened up, rolling his shoulder back until it was hanging properly. “We can’t just leave them there shouting at each other!”

“Realistically speaking, we could.”

“And practically speaking, we’re not going to,” Tabasa said firmly, and pulled Kantera into the room.

Walter, Yumi, and Raymond all looked up at them, and the shouting stopped in the middle of Walter reading off some law or other from his phone. Yumi put down the pillow she’d apparently been pummelling as a kind of warning. Kantera smiled as threateningly as he could manage.

“I hear there’s been something of a misunderstanding,” he said, taking a seat next to Yumi on the less garish sofa. The coffee table was gold-lined and reflective where it wasn’t covered with cold tea things, and the room was filled with an eclectic mess of their second-best furniture. All western-styled and all outdated. It wasn’t Kantera’s favourite place to be.

“There has _not_ been a misunderstanding,” Walter huffed. “You’ve been committing tax fraud for _years_!”

“We’re all dead!” Yumi shouted back, rolling her eyes. “The hell does it matter? We don’t have any income ’part from that inheritance, that’s what I’ve been _tellin’_ you!”

“And I’m telling _you_ that you need to pay tax on that!”

Kantera put his hands together, sparing a glance for Raymond, who was leaning against the mantelpiece and evidently pretending he was anywhere but here. Fair enough. Tabasa, for his part, had his head in his hands.

“Would you two please calm down?” Kantera asked softly in a pause in the argument. “Walter, I appreciate your concern, but we are not going to start paying tax soon, just as we are not going to declare ourselves as alive to the appropriate authorities.” He spread his arms, smiling. “We would far rather be though of as deceased.”

Walter fumed, but didn’t say anything. It was a relief, Kantera supposed, to see him in such fine spirits a mere fortnight after his traumatic experience. The cast still hadn’t come off, though the bandages had, which Kantera was thankful for since they had been alarming.

“Does anyone know Russell’s alive?” Walter eventually asked. “Is he registered anywhere? Do you have a birth certificate?”

“I imagine he has one, but as we have no connection to his life before he met us, and he says he remembers nothing, we have none of that information.”

Walter groaned and stared up at the ceiling. “This is a mess. This is such a _mess_.”

“Well, it weren’t a mess until y’all showed up and started confusin’ everythin’!” Yumi snarled.

“It _was_ a mess: you just weren’t acknowledging it!” Walter bit back, and then stopped when Raymond came over and put hands on his shoulders. For a moment, everything seemed peaceful, and it almost looked as if Raymond was going to start massaging him.

“Walter, seriously, calm down a bit,” he said in a soothing voice. “So what if they’re committing tax fraud? It’s not like it’s our problem, and they are technically dead, you know.”

Walter stiffened. “You’re only saying that because you want to try doing it too.”

“…I’m not going to deny that.”

It was a testament to Walter’s exhaustion that he didn’t explode into more anger at that: instead, he released a painful-sounding cry of exasperation, and sunk his head into his hands. Kantera took the chance he’d been given, and turned the conversation to more pleasant fields by greeting Raymond.

“I trust you’re well? Have you come to see anyone or are you merely along for the ride?”

Raymond didn’t seem to resent the implication that he had nothing to do with Walter’s research, most likely because it was true. He grinned. “Just thought I’d come along and see how Russell and Gardenia are holding up.”

“Oh, well. Gardenia’s in her room, I believe, and Russell…?” He realised that he had no idea where Russell was, and looked over sharply at Yumi. It was never easy to recognise emotions on her face, it being a skull, but her expression managed to look dark anyway.

Tabasa piped up. “I think he was with Dogma and Cody last time I heard. They were going down to the old chapel.”

“You have a chapel?” Both Walter and Raymond looked over at Tabasa, who seemed to try and sink into the cushions to get away from their gaze.

“It’s a kind of run-down one…” he said, looking over at Yumi and Kantera for help. “I mean, it’s not very good and there’s a lot of damage and burns and stuff, and no one goes there but Dogma usually…”

“It figures you’d have a creepy old chapel up here,” Raymond muttered, moving away from the back of the sofa after Walter dug his nails into Raymond’s hands to get him off. He paused on his way back to the mantelpiece. “How far out did you say the chapel is? You, uh, said last time that Russell’s distance from the house is what makes that thing turn up, right?”

The room felt a little colder, thought Kantera supposed that was only to be expected, given the lack of heating. That was what it was, surely.

“Distance has been what has triggered it before, but the chapel is not especially far away,” Kantera said, mostly to reassure himself. “He’s been there many a time, and nothing has ever happened. It’s barely even out of the estate.”

“’S not like he’s ever been there right after havin’ an incident though, is it?” Yumi said thoughtfully.

“But there’s no reason that should have anything to do with it,” Kantera pointed out, his voice tinged with more aggression than he might have liked.

The group lapsed into thought, clearly left disarmed by the thought that was burrowing its way into their minds. It was foolish. If they began to see everything as a danger, they would never be able to live normally. It was madness itself to be so worried, and he said so, and the others agreed, and that was that. There was nothing to do but shoo Yumi and Raymond out of the room, and then answer a barrage of questions on the one part of his vampire physicality that Kantera would sooner have forgotten existed.

And if worries remained, he ignored them.


	7. Educational Experiences

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick apology: this is very short, perfectly skippable, and has nothing to do with the main plotline. It's set two or three years before the events of the main plotline, too. I just wrote it to procrastinate and because I wanted to set some things straight for myself.
> 
> This chapter: the adults (minus Saxon) discuss how best to do sex education when you're home-schooling

Tabasa wasn’t sure whose idea this was, but he wanted to punch them. Group meetings were never fun, because it just meant everyone was sitting there nervously, or they were bored and waiting for it all to be over. Or they were Yumi and running the thing. Whatever.

Either way, he, Mireille and Dogma were in the nervous set. Cody and Kantera were bored – Cody floating around the chair she was supposed to be sitting on, and Kantera sitting with such poise and measured grace that Tabasa couldn’t stop looking over him. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that they were all sat in a circle in one of the living rooms and it was _creepy_. He was sure his leg was going to fall off with how much he was jiggling it, and – unfortunately – that wasn’t an exaggeration.

“A’right,” Yumi clapped her hands together with an alarming clacking sound. “So y’all probably know what we’re here for, but for those that don’t, I’ve been thinkin’ that we’re gonna need to…supplement Russell and Gardenia’s education.”

“Supplement,” Kantera repeated, perfectly. Tabasa looked down at his knees and the carpet underneath.

“Yeah. Regular education’s great an’ all, but Russell’s gettin’ to that age, and I’m thinkin’ we’re gonna need to give him some basic sex education. Not sure about Gardenia, but y’know.”

“You can’t be serious,” Dogma said, casually hovering just above the chair he was pretending to sit in. “He’s far too young yet.”

“He _is_ twelve…” Mireille pointed out quietly. “That’s quite old, actually, for s-sex education…”

“Is he really twelve now?” Dogma looked stunned at the nods he was met with. “But he was only ten the other day…”

“Two years previously, I think you’ll find,” Kantera said, straightening his kimono. Perfectly. Tabasa really had to stop looking at him: it was terrible for a guy’s self-esteem.

“ _Anyway_ ,” Yumi said with a slam of her hand onto her thigh bone, “we can’t put it off any longer, right? So someone’s gotta do it. Tabasa, you’re closest to him: you do it.”

There were murmurs of approval, and Tabasa squawked in protest to try and drown them out. “ _I_ can’t do it! It’d be super awkward, and I hate that kind of thing, and I don’t even have the right equipment! Someone who’s got a dick should do it! Also someone who’s not Dogma, no offence Dogma.”

“Some taken,” Dogma sniffed.

Kantera leant his chin on his hand and looked across Mireille at Tabasa, whose mouth promptly went dry. Dryer than usual, anyway. Zombies weren’t blessed with much saliva.

Kantera’s eyes were still on him. “Considering that leaves me as the only person with, as you say, the same ‘equipment’ as Russell, I think I see where this conversation is going, and I can’t say I like it.” He let his eyes stay on Tabasa a moment longer than would have been natural, before looking back at Yumi, who was sitting across from him. She seemed to be enjoying the show.

A dramatic sigh came from Cody, who was now floating above her brother as if she was lying down in mid-air. “Oh come on, you’re all such cowards. I’ll do it.”

“You will _not_.” Dogma slammed his hands on the armrests of his chair, though it had significantly less impact than he probably would have liked, since he wasn’t actually physical at all.

Cody sighed even more dramatically than before, rolling her eyes as she floated over to the other side of the room. “Dogma, for god’s sake…”

“Do _not_ take God’s name in vain for this! You’re not doing it!”

“Not to mention,” Kantera said calmly, “that I believe it might be…improper, or merely inappropriate, for a virgin to explain sex to–”

Cody cut him off with a snarl and shot over to hover in front of him. “Say that again to my face, asshole: see where it gets you.”

“I only want Russell to get the best possible information.” Kantera smiled and put his hands up like a surface-level attempt at defending himself.

“Come _on_ , he’s twelve! What will he possibly need to know that I don’t?!”

“C-calm down, Cody!” Mireille leant forwards, trying to be soothing. “Of course we’d work out what he should be taught first, and you wouldn’t have to do it alone!”

Tabasa caught Dogma’s eye and they shared a look of unadulterated horror at the idea of ‘working out what he should be taught’. Something clearly had to be done, but Tabasa sure didn’t know what, unless it was as simple as an escape. Actually. Not such a bad idea. The door wasn’t very far away, and the others were still arguing, and they could hardly ask him to stay just to work out some sex education script.

Before he had the chance to make a run for it, Yumi cut in again. “Okay, yeah, that’s enough right there. Settle down! Anyways, if we’ve got that settled–” (but they clearly hadn’t) “–Tabasa, was that you volunteerin’ to give the talk to Gardenia earlier? Since your only excuse was not havin’ the same equipment.”

“What? No! I’m not even that close with her! And doesn’t she already know?”

No one answered, since no one knew exactly how mature Gardenia was. Maybe she just liked to pretend she was a child because it meant she could get away with stealing Tabasa’s limbs. Anything was possible.

“Um,” Mireille said hesitantly, looking very small. “D-do you think we might just…ask them? Ask them if they know or not? Th-that might prevent any, um, awkward…ness…”

This was generally found to be an excellent idea, mostly because it meant they could stop the meeting right there without having to come up with anything too mentally taxing. Or emotionally, considering the whole ‘sex education script’ thing. Tabasa didn’t think his heart would take it, but that was mostly because of the fear that Kantera would be active in the conversation. But that didn’t bear thinking about.

He did, of course, think about it, and as a result he was too preoccupied to protest when he and Mireille were chosen to interrogate the kids.

 

“The talk?” Gardenia repeated, looking up from the magazine she was reading on Russell’s bed. He didn’t seem to mind. He was too busy reading and occasionally looking into the mirror put casually on his bedside table.

Mireille floundered. “Y-yes…you know, the…”

“The sex talk?”

“…y-yes.”

“Oh, we’ve already had that.” Gardenia waved a hand flippantly and turned back to her magazine. Her legs started kicking back and forth again. “Both of us have, so don’t worry or anything. The Informant told us everything we need to know.”

“What?” Tabasa looked around for a reflective surface with the Informant in it but found none, so he settled for looking at Russell, who shrugged. “Why did the Informant give you guys the talk?”

“He thought we should know,” Gardenia explained succinctly.

“And what, he told you everything?”

Gardenia rolled her eyes at the magazine, as if Tabasa wasn’t going to see that. “Duh. He gave us the basics on human reproduction, the low-down on like three different kinds of sex, some stuff about safety and all that kind of–…look, _you_ asked. Don’t look at me like that! It’s not that big of a deal!”

She had him there. Tabasa took his face out of his hand and looked up, mildly mortified but mostly relieved. Thank god for the Informant, though Tabasa really didn’t want to know how he’d learnt everything if Russell didn’t also know.

Just to check, he asked, “And Russell? You’re, uh, cool with everything?”

Russell shrugged, putting his book down so the spine bent. “I already knew a lot of it, and it’s not difficult. It’s really fine. And there were those comics Gardenia fou–”

Gardenia slapped a hand across his mouth, contorting her body in a way that probably would have ripped her arm off if she were human. Grinning widely, she turned back to Tabasa and Mireille.

“Ignore that.”

Mireille blinked. “I, um, I’m not sure we should, in good conscience…”

“Then do it in bad conscience,” Gardenia said, still smiling, her hand still over Russell’s mouth. He appeared to have resigned himself to his fate and was looking down into the mirror again. Probably having a conversation with the Informant. Tabasa didn’t have the time to really wonder, because Gardenia’s eyes were beginning to glow red like they did whenever she was about to throw a tantrum.

“We won’t tell anyone, Gardenia: don’t sweat it,” Tabasa said in a pacifying voice. He didn’t feel calm, but angry vampires had that effect on everyone. Putting his hands on Mireille’s shoulders and angling her towards the door, he smiled. “Maybe put those comics back, though? But if everything else is fine, we’ll just, uh, go.” And they did.

He and Mireille shared a look when they’d closed the door behind them. It wasn’t an encouraging look, but it did communicate the mutual agreement to pretend everything was totally fine. And it probably was, really.

So, taking the path of least resistance, they went back downstairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To clarify, because it might not be clear with the whole zombie-whose-limbs-come-off thing, Tabasa is trans, not an AMAB zombie who just misplaced his dick somewhere. That would be...really very unfortunate.


	8. Tear it out and Burn it up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been a bit preoccupied with the (no longer very accurately-named) [bodyswap au](http://eristastic.tumblr.com/post/153323813917/end-roll-au-set-1-bodyswap-au-part-1) and the [thing I wrote for it](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8604706), but I'll stop the advertising there and instead apologise for giving Dogma and Cody's chapter to a POV character who doesn't care enough about them to include them much. That was a lack of foresight on my part. Oh well.
> 
> (Also, this one isn't very happy)
> 
> This chapter: the Informant and fire (drinking game: take a shot every time I used a word related to fire)

It had been raining again, but the Informant couldn’t complain about that. He never had to deal with the weather anyway, and at least this way he could spend less time in the dark as Russell walked through the forest, following the ghost siblings to the chapel.

It wasn’t a good idea. Russell shouldn’t have left the house. The Informant knew that – he could feel it like dread poisoning the very air he breathed – but he hadn’t said anything, because on the other hand, Russell would do better to remember. And it wasn’t like Russell would talk about it with anyone. Not even the Informant. It was so unfair: what else was he _there_ for? Did Russell think he _enjoyed_ being on the other side of every mirror, of every reflective surface, just pressing his face against the screen and wishing he could breach it? If he was there, he was there for Russell, but Russell had closed up on himself.

So the Informant had been made redundant, in every sense of the phrase.

He closed his eyes and sighed lightly, sitting down and crossing his legs in his void. The window to the outside never changed size and he could never pass it: it was a hole in an invisible wall, and he stared up at it, looking at Russell from the perspective of a puddle. Or several puddles, he supposed. The angle did keep changing.

“Why did you go with them?” he asked in his Russell-only voice, but it hardly mattered, given how far behind the ghosts Russell was. “You don’t like going to the chapel.”

Russell looked down and shrugged, but kept walking.

“Was it just to please Dogma and Cody? That seems a bit desperate, doesn’t it?”

“It wasn’t,” he said in an undertone, but of course the Informant heard it clearly.

“…it was to get out, wasn’t it? You don’t want to be around everyone now that you’ve remembered about Gardenia.”

No response. Russell stared ahead at the siblings, occasionally brushing past a branch that got in his way. Dogma was discussing something pointless with his sister, and the Informant didn’t really care to pay attention to that.

He tried again. “It’s been a long time since you remembered about Mireille, hasn’t it? Is that why it hurt so much? I think it’s been getting worse, though. You barely reacted to Yumi’s, and she was the first. You didn’t forget after the first three, did you? Of course you didn’t. You just stopped thinking about it. You were in a warm, loving household, so you stopped thinking about it.”

“Shut up.”

The Informant closed his eyes and breathed out. It hurt. Russell hadn’t told him to shut up in _years_ , which was astounding in and of itself, really. So it hurt, but that was his fault. Russell had been on edge for days, and apparently today was the day he was going to blow up. But of course, for Russell, that didn’t mean much. It just meant coldness where there should have been warmth, but what did the Informant know about that now?

He had no idea. He only knew that he didn’t want things to change, but knew with just as much conviction that things had to.

So that was that.

He didn’t say anything the whole way to the chapel. After a while, even the ghosts stopped talking, and then there was just the rhythm of raindrops on branches and leaves, and a constantly-moving image of Russell walking through a drenched forest. Sometimes, painfully-bright grey sky showed up through the trees, but the Informant wasn’t looking at that. Russell’s expression didn’t change, from what he could see. Not that he could see much if Russell didn’t look down at him. Puddles were terrible.

The chapel looked about as intimidating as it ever did: a towering building of mossy grey stone and half a roof, the other half resting peacefully somewhere among the remains of pews. Somehow, the enormous stained glass window was still intact, and as Russell walked over what had been half of the roof, the afternoon sun poured through, lighting the wreckage of a chapel up in reds and yellows.

“Russell, would you mind lighting the candles?” Dogma asked, floating over to the altar. There was an old altar cloth on it, totally soaked, but that was to be expected. There was only so much you could do with a broken-down chapel. Thankfully, the candlesticks weren’t too tarnished to reflect Russell, and the Informant finally found himself at a better height to see Russell’s expression. It didn’t bode well. He didn’t look like he knew what emotion was.

Fishing a packet of matches out of a drawer and moving the candles somewhere that was still covered, Russel began to light them. Dogma and Cody floated around, doing something that the Informant couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to.

“Are you okay?” he asked, as if he didn’t know. It was pleasant to play pretend, sometimes – to go through platitudes like they meant something.

Russell shrugged, striking a match. It lit his face up in warm tones for a moment, a single spark in a building of washed-out watercolours.

The Informant gritted his teeth. “Russell, I think you should talk to Gardenia about it.”

Russell lit several candles and didn’t give the impression he’d even heard. It was so unfair. The Informant hadn’t even wanted to say it – he wanted Russell to only talk to him, only open up to him – and to have his pride burnt like that stung. It just stung. He had to try again. He had to, for Russell’s sake, or he wouldn’t have done it at all.

“Please. You need to talk to someone. You can’t go on like this, Russell: you’re eating yourself up, taking it all in and never saying anything, and you’re going to burn out. I know it hurts to remember, but do you think it’s not hurting them when you avoid them? Gardenia looked like she was going to cry this morning. You really can’t go on like this. You need to work this out, or else you’ll–”

He stopped in surprise when the candlestick he was seeing Russell through toppled over, along with all the others. Russell dropped the match he was holding as he turned to look over at something in the middle of the chapel. The Informant couldn’t see. He switched from puddle to candlestick to broken window panes, but he couldn’t see anything properly, and Russell hadn’t brought his pocket mirror with him. The Informant couldn’t _see_ : the only reliable angle he had was tilted, cutting out whatever Russell and the ghosts were staring at and backing away from. As Russell stepped backwards, the Informant just had the time to see horror on Cody and Dogma’s faces before there was the roar of something bursting into flame.

It couldn’t have been natural. Nothing natural would have set all the pews ablaze like that: the flames soared within seconds, like fiery hands reaching for the sky. All the Informant could see was Russell, tripping backwards, falling to the cracked stone tiles with his eyes fixed on the inferno. The flames reached for him, playing with him, and his eyes were wide enough that even from his distance, the Informant could see flames reflected in them.

The initial shock withered to cinders within moments, and then the screams began. The Informant couldn’t see what was going on at first, but it didn’t take a great deal of imagination to guess. It was like this each time. But now it was two of them: in the sweltering, misty image that he had of Russell – shaking like a mirage – he saw Dogma and Cody approach.

They were like burning scarecrows – ragged imitations of humans, stumbling towards Russell, tearing burning hands down their faces. None of their features were visible through the fire.

“ _You did this!_ ” they screamed in hellish tandem, their voices croaky and racked with tears. “Why would you do this to us?!”

“We never did _anything_ to you!” Cody cried, crumpling to the stone as her legs gave way into charred splinters. With skeletally-burnt fingers, she reached for Russell’s feet, but he kicked her away, scrambling backwards with his face twisted in raw terror.

It was that sight – because of course it had to have been – that brought the Informant out of his shocked apathy.

“Russell!” he screamed, pushing up against his window, completely at a loss. If this was the nightmare, then why hadn’t Russell felt the pain before it had come? Had he? But the Informant should have felt that: it was all too sudden, far too soon after the last one, and even though logically the Informant knew that Russell couldn’t get hurt here, what was he supposed to feel but rigid fear? Russell was backed up against the wall with only his feet in the Informant’s view, and the burning ghosts reached for him, driven by the wave of flames sweeping behind them. Cody was crawling along using only her brittle, burning arms, her eyes and mouth like three gaping holes that sucked in the furnace of her skin. Dogma was no better: he limped, stumbling jaggedly until he fell to the floor in a crackle of bone and charcoal. Still, they screamed.

“We did _nothing_ to you!” came something that might once have been Dogma’s voice, eaten up and spat out by the constant blare of fire.

Cody’s cries, too, rose above the din. “We just wanted to share what we had!”

“Why did you think our happiness was so ugly you had to do _this_?!”

“Give it back! Give it _back_!”

The Informant pounded his fists against the window uselessly. “Russell! Don’t listen to them! Don’t listen: you deserve happiness, you don’t deserve this, I swear you don’t, you’re not bad, you’re not–”

“ _Why would you do this?!_ ” Cody screamed, her voice breaking up with her body. “Why did you hate us so much?!”

Russell’s feet shuffled as if he was trying to push himself further back, but there was nowhere to go.

“There is no forgiveness for this!” Dogma shrieked in a voice that crumbled and cracked. “How can you repent when you won’t even accept it?!”

“Russell, please!” the Informant pleaded, though he held no hope of getting a reply. “Please don’t–”

“ _How_ dare _you?!_ ” the siblings shouted, and their voices and bodies were no longer their own. They were a burning heap, sacrifices to the pyre in the middle of the chapel. And slowly, step by erratic step as if it had never known hurry, the creature stepped over the mess of flames, drawn straight to Russell.

The Informant couldn’t see anything after that, but he heard the crying.

 

The fire had died down unnaturally quickly. God only knew where the siblings had gone, because they weren’t in the chapel: if they had been, they’d have said something. Instead, Russell had been motionless for well over an hour. The Informant had stopped calling out to him some time ago: now he just sat, wondering what they were going to do. Every so often, he’d remember the understated, choking sounds Russell had made while the creature had…had done whatever it did to him.

And then the Informant could only shut his eyes and try to forget. It wasn’t like it made a difference either way. He couldn’t do anything.

He was encased in glass, and all he could do was wait and watch and scream at the top of his lungs, even when it did no good at all.

You had to try, after all. He just couldn’t see the point anymore.

His heart jumped about treacherously in his ribcage when he saw the first signs of Russell getting up. It took him some minutes before his legs slipped out of the Informant’s field of vision, and then he was walking over the char-black stone, and the Informant got to look at him.

It was only a second, but that was enough. His hair was singed, messy and streaked with black. His skin was no better, and his eyes were red, but – again – there was no expression on his face as he walked across the chapel. The Informant watched him from puddles, waiting for him to speak, but he didn’t offer anything. He left the walls of the chapel and, very deliberately, turned to walk in the opposite way to how they’d come.

“Russell.”

The muddy grass must have been potholed with puddles, though the rain seemed to have stopped. The Informant could even see the beginnings of blue in the break among the trees, but what did he care for that?

“Russell.”

Russell walked, his face set in stone. With every sign of doing it intentionally, he walked in the way of brambles and low-hanging branches, letting them rip his clothes and scrape his soot-speckled skin.

“Russell!”

“Go away.”

The order was so ludicrous that for a second, the Informant couldn’t even process it. What on earth did he _mean_? Go away? But the Informant couldn’t have ever dreamed of leaving him, even if he’d been able to.

“Russell, what are you doing?”

He stamped heavily in the Informant’s puddle, splitting his image up into ripples. “I don’t want this anymore.”

“Russell?”

“I DON’T WANT THIS ANYMORE!” he screamed, coming to a stop in the middle of the forest. His head was bent into his chest, his hands fisted at his sides, and the Informant could barely see him.

“I don’t _want_ this!” he repeated, voice choked by tears. “I don’t _want_ to remember! But I have to, because I did it, and if I did it then I don’t want to go back and play house with the corpses of the people I killed, because _I don’t deserve that!_ I don’t belong there anymore: I never belonged there! I…!” He cut himself off, lifting hands to his face.

If he cried, the Informant couldn’t tell. He couldn’t tell, and he hadn’t been able to tell. What good was he if he didn’t know everything about Russell? But he hadn’t known this. He hadn’t known that it had been hurting this much.

Staring up at Russell’s hunched shoulders, locked behind a screen he’d never be able to cross, the Informant understood how useless he was.


	9. The Tethers Binding Us to Others

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This feels a bit like a filler chapter to me, but hey, we can't hang out with the super plot-relevant characters ALL the time. Just like 90% of the time, with how I'm speeding through this.  
> Anyway, I had things I wanted to say, and it's always easier to say it through writing than otherwise.
> 
> This chapter: Gardenia and the downsides of being plucky

Gardenia stood in the kitchen, staring down at the polished counter and the blur of white in it that must have been the reflection of her hair. She couldn’t concentrate. It was a restless, flighty thing, where nothing felt satisfying or comfortable, and all she could do was hate the position she was in and hope it would go away soon. Which, of course, it wouldn’t.

The walls of the mansion were thick, but she could still hear the adults arguing.

It was as if they thought she wouldn’t notice or something. It was like they thought that if they pushed her gently into the kitchen and asked her to keep herself occupied for a while, then she wouldn’t know what they were upset about, or that they were upset at all. Sure, like she hadn’t seen Dogma and Cody’s horrified expressions. Like she didn’t know that Russell had been with them, and wasn’t here now. But no, let them tuck her away into a toy-box, because she sure wasn’t going to be any help, right?

It was always like this.

She pushed away from the counter and spun around, hands on her hips. Well, hands fisted into the ribbon of her apron, but it amounted to the same thing. She wasn’t going to panic, or get angry, or upset. She was going to think about this calmly, and accept that the rest were never going to tell her the truth. Nor was Russell, but she was slightly more inclined to forgive him, because that was his nature. And anyway, regardless of what had happened that day at the office, regardless of the memories that slipped out of her fingers like sand she hadn’t known she was digging through, regardless of everything else, they had to get him back now. Grudges could wait until after they knew he was safe.

And if the adults wouldn’t let her do it, she was going to go and do it without them.

She was stopped just as she reached the first floor, which she was going to count as a victory, because she really hadn’t thought she’d get out of the kitchen. Crossing her arms and leaning against the banister of the stairs she’d just come up, she stared Raymond down. She didn’t say anything to start with, since neither he nor Walter spoke either. And if they took her lack of smile for a challenge, that was their business.

“Gardenia,” Raymond said finally. He looked uncomfortable.

“Not included in the argument?” she asked, indicating with her head the one she meant, although it would have been an accomplishment to somehow not hear how everyone was shouting at each other. It didn’t sound aggressive, though: it just sounded like they needed to shout and the others were available to be shouted at.

“Clearly not,” he said, shrugging.

“Have they told you anything?”

“No. You either?”

She tossed her hair, trying not to look bitter and failing. “Why would they tell a kid anything important? They just asked me to leave.”

He snickered. “Wow.”

“Yeah, okay, I get it: it’s funny, but it’s _really not_ ,” she scowled at the floor, scraping her slipper toes back and forth across the stone. “Anyway. Why are you two still here?”

“Walter’s got a case of the old guilt,” Raymond said airily, earning him a glare from Walter, who did look particularly guilty, now Gardenia looked at him. He was fiddling with the buttons of his coat like he was deliberately trying to tear one off. He didn’t say anything to Raymond’s jab either, which was a giveaway in and of itself.

“Well,” Gardenia said, putting a hand out, “it’s not like it’s really your fault, you know. The first time was just bad luck, and my fault for not listening to what Yumi always said. Not that I think it’s _totally_ my fault, since she never gave a reason, and how was I supposed to know something terrible would happen and then I wouldn’t even be able to remember it? Anyway. This time was just a coincidence. Really, I think it’s their fault for never telling us anything. Even now. Even when it’s most important.”

She let her hand drop.

Raymond was looking at her pityingly, which she didn’t like. He seemed perfectly at ease lounging on a side table in the foyer, lit up by the dull lights of the chandelier they really needed to clean, and it was mildly infuriating that he’d pity her so obviously in her own home like this. Everyone else was already looking down on her enough: did he have to do it too?

So she glared. He looked back placidly, still smiling.

“Anyway,” she said as if she were clearing her throat. “Have fun waiting around for them to finish.” With that said, she stalked over to the door, trying to look as confident as she could while replacing her slippers with shoes. She’d almost got away with it – had even gone to collect her parasol from the umbrella stand by the door – when Walter coughed.

“I don’t think you should do that,” he said quietly, barely looking at her. His button really was going to break off, the way he was pulling at it. “I can’t order you not to, but I don’t think you should go. They’ll worry.”

“They’re already worrying,” she spat back, her hand on the heavy, brass door-handle. “They’re not doing anything about it either.”

“No,” Raymond agreed. “But you’ll worry them more if you go. Look, Gardenia, I’ll be straight up with you here: if you leave, they’re going to lose it. At least half of them will, anyway. You saw them when the ghosts came back without him: Mireille looked like she was going to collapse, Tabasa wasn’t much better, Kantera was _this_ close to going feral, and I’ve never seen a skeleton express that much dread before. Like, we’re not talking about a small upset here. And if you go too, they’re really going to lose it.”

He spread his arms, still smiling sadly. Irritatingly. “If you go, you’re going to make things worse.”

“But they’re not doing _anything_!” Gardenia shouted, her fist trembling on the handle.

Raymond nodded. “No, they’re not. But they’re going to, and all that stuff they won’t tell you? That’s got something to do with it, I’d guess. You know they’re probably just trying to protect you, right?”

“Fat lot of good it’s doing me now.”

“Well, yeah,” he laughed lightly, stretching backwards in an almost expert demonstration of insouciance. “But they’ll do something. They care about him too: you know that. And sure, this might not be Walter or my fault, but things do tend to go bottoms-up whenever we come round here, so the least we can do is make sure their other kid is safe and accounted for while they’re losing their heads over Russell, right?”

Gardenia glared at the floor. He didn’t know anything (except he did), and having him speak down to her (though he wasn’t really) was seriously pissing her off. She just wanted to do something; she just wanted to fix things for once. _She_ wasn’t going to lose her nerve like everyone else was. She was going to run out there and save Russell, because someone had to do it.

But she didn’t know how. It felt like she was playing a bit role in a play she hadn’t read the script for.

Raymond was still looking at her, and seemed to have taken her silence for the stubbornness it was. “Gardenia?” he said, miles calmer than his partner. “We _will_ stop you if you try to leave, okay? I may be a half-blood, but you know I’m still stronger than you.”

Without looking up, she glared harder, crumpling her face up into impotent anger. “You can’t turn into a bat, though,” she said pettishly.

“Yeah okay, I can’t, and screw you too for reminding me. But unless you somehow go feral and I don’t, you won’t be leaving here if I don’t let you, yeah?”

His words on their own would have sent her into just the rage he was describing, with the way she was – she could already feel the anger tingling at her edges, and she knew her eyes would be tinged with red – but the way he said it stopped her. He was trying to reason with her; she looked up to see him sadly, gently reaching a hand out.

The urge to run out of the door was very strong. Whatever Raymond said, she was sure she’d be able to at least get far enough to transform, and then he wouldn’t be able to catch her. Then, she’d be able to search for Russell and bring him back home, and everything would be almost-fine again.

But she’d seen Mireille’s expression shatter too. She’d seen Tabasa on the verge of tears too. And no matter how much she wanted to act, she was tied to them. Not a daughter, not a sister, but family anyway, and she had responsibilities towards them: whether she liked it or not, she was tied by too many threads to count, and she couldn’t bring herself to cut them.

Having family was not an easy thing, and nor was it without obligation. Miserably, she understood that. Tears began to prick her eyes, and she threw her parasol to the ground so she could wipe them with the back of her arm.

And then, slowly, she walked over to Raymond and sat against the table with him, letting him put an arm around her shoulders.

“I hate this,” she mumbled, gulping back tears.

“Yeah. I hate it too, kid.” He sounded tired.

“I hate him for this. I love him and I want him back, but I _hate_ him for doing this.”

Walter came to stand on her other side, still fiddling with his coat awkwardly. “Why do you think he did it deliberately?”

“I don’t know! I don’t… I don’t want to imagine that he didn’t.”

There were silent nods, and Gardenia hung her head, letting sheer white hair curtain her vision so all she could see were her feet shuffling together.

“Well,” Raymond said, squeezing her shoulder. “At least he’s got the Informant with him.”

“Yeah, like that’s going to help,” Gardenia said, smiling as unkindly as she thought herself capable of. “Don’t get me wrong: I like the Informant and all, but what’s he going to do? He’s stuck behind mirrors all the time.”

“Fair point.”

There didn’t seem to be much to say after that. All they had left to do was to wait until the others came to a decision, and Gardenia couldn’t even find it within herself to be impatient anymore. All she could feel was the slow, creeping dread of memories she couldn’t quite remember, as she tried to think about what had happened that day.

But nothing revealed itself to her. That was just how it was going to be: all she could do was wait.


	10. The Trial of the Little Prince

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I wanted closure. Sorry it took so long.

Once upon a time, there was a little prince. He was not a prince through birth or marriage or anything so mundane: he was a prince purely because – despite the squalor, the screams, the stench of alcohol that filled his life like miasma – he was visited by a fairy godmother. And that was what made princes and princesses, wasn’t it? All the books said so.

Thus, the fairy godmother asked him: what is it that you desire, my dear?

And the prince, unused to such attentions, stayed silent a few moments. The fairy godmother waited patiently for him, her wings seeming to vibrate as they kept her hovering, and her many eyes blinking out of time. Then, after he had clenched his fists tightly (to hold his courage close), he said that – above all things – what he wanted most was to be loved.

And the fairy godmother said, “Well, that’s not very reasonable, is it?”

The prince looked at her in what would have been confusion if he had not been so used to rejection. As it was, he felt only the familiar clutches of chilling disappointment, but knew better than to show it.

“Oh no, my dear,” the fairy godmother went on, shaking her head. “No, I don’t think we can do that. But how about this: I’ll let you keep wanting that, and I’ll make it so you have the strength to take anything you want for yourself. How about that? Yes, I think that’s what we’ll do.”

And that’s what they did.

And as she faded away ( _no_ , the little prince would have screamed if he hadn’t learnt not to _, no, don’t leave me here: you can deny me anything and tease me and mock me and hate me but don’t leave me here_ ), darkness began to creep in. Time passed as if buffeted by her fluttering wings, bringing with it new faces, new desires that seemed to eat at the little prince’s heart like maggots on festering meat, new urges that shuddered through him like instinctive disgust, and new ways of carrying out those same urges.

Thusly, he grew older, though not by much. He found he had the strength to take anything he wanted for himself. He did not, however, have the strength to stop.

Blessings never did run smoothly.

Where there should have been fairy dust, glamour, balls, laughter, nice clothes and people who talked to him, there was blood. No glitter here: only a single blood-soaked path he had been destined to walk. The very ground was sticky under his bare feet, clinging to him like treacle that burned his skin, the air was thick and polluted with his presence, and it was cold, so cold: his chest was a hollow drum the wind blew through, ripping from him any precious thing he might once have had so all he had left to warm him were rage, envy, wretched desires for what he could never possess, and it hurt, it hurt, it hurt it hurt i thurt it hu rtith ur t ith u rt—

“Russell!”

Russell’s eyes snapped open. His heart felt like it was stuttering, and after catching his breath, he struggled to push himself up against the harsh bark of the tree behind him, desperate for some kind of support. For a few moments, he stayed like that, breathing through his mouth and trying to wish away the lightness in his head. It seemed to suffocate him. Then he rested his head against the tree, staring up at the patchwork of leaf cover and darkening sky above him.

“Russell, how are you feeling?”

It had been raining again, he noted dully. For a while, there had been no reflections and the Informant hadn’t been there. He didn’t remember much of that time. It all blended together, like a wet brush through paint. It hadn’t been good. But then there had been sleep, and he didn’t know how long he had done that for. It had been dark, last he remembered, and it was almost dark now.

“It’s been more than a day, hasn’t it?” the Informant said quietly. His voice seemed as pervasive as the perfume of rain in the air. “Are you sure you shouldn’t go back?”

On the contrary: Russell was sure he should go back, but it wasn’t a matter of should or shouldn’t, or even want or don’t want. Not now he’d proved he couldn’t be trusted.

“Russell, you need to find something to eat. At the very least, you need to drink.”

Russell’s legs shook when he got to his feet, and he had to take a second to regain his balance. His clothes were alternately muddy, ripped, or both, and it almost felt familiar (but no, no, that was so long ago – so long now that he had been lulled into a false sense of security, of domesticity he didn’t belong to).

(So long, he’d forgotten what he really was)

There was the muffled sound of swallowing from all around him. “Russell, please.”

He was being juvenile. The least he could do was listen to the Informant, so – brushing hair out of his eyes – he looked down at the nearest puddle and waited.

His face (but pained, drawn – did he look like that now?) reflected back at him, and the Informant tried again. “They love you, Russell. You can’t do this.”

No, he was getting it wrong. They loved Russell, so he had to do this. He had tricked them all, drawn them all in as surely as if he had spun his web around them, and it was all his fault. They loved him, and that was why it hurt, because that love was directed not at him, but at the Russell they thought they knew. He had ripped that Russell away from them, and now they would hate him.

It made sense, really, that the fairy godmother’s words would hold true even now.

Or no: not fully. Because he could still see the Informant’s barely-concealed grief, wrapped up in the tattered remains of the confidence he seemed to cling to. Russell was quiet and inexpressive, but he was not obtuse. He knew what it meant when the Informant looked at him like that. He knew, and – because it seemed the kindest thing to do in this situation; because he so desperately needed to be kind and could manage it no other way – he tried to smile weakly at the puddle by his feet. Then he began to walk through the rapidly-darkening forest.

Going by the choked sob he heard from behind him, he was no better at giving love than he was at getting it. He couldn’t even say it was because he hadn’t had the chance to learn by observation, not now.

The problem was with him – always had been – and problems had to be got rid of.  Such was the way of things.

 

 

There was something uniquely oppressive about the atmosphere that built up around a group of exhausted people who had no idea what to do now their efforts had all proved useless, but who all knew they had to do _something_. It was a cloying, sickening silence that no one wanted to break. It was everyone pretending to be more tired than they were – leaning against walls and grandfather clocks and sofas – so that no one would ask them anything. It was Tabasa sitting as close to Kantera as he could, fiddling with the once-sturdy stitches on his left arm and wishing it could all be over, because any more of this was going to choke him.

They were just waiting on Yumi and Cody now: everyone else (barring Gardenia, who had been asked to stay, and Raymond and Walter, who had been asked to watch her) had already come back from searching around the chapel. They hadn’t found much more than cinders and scorched stone. It was a pity, Raymond had joked feebly, that none of them had any werewolf blood in them to sniff Russell out. Some, or any way of tracking him would have been a start, at least. The one upside to it all, Mireille had pointed out nervously, was the relative certainty that Russell wasn’t bleeding, because the vampires would have found him if so.

But there were, as everyone knew but didn’t say, many ways to get into trouble that didn’t involve blood. Especially now Russell had been gone for over twenty-four hours.

When the drawing room door opened, everyone looked up, and at least three of them – Tabasa included – leapt to their feet like squirrels noticing a predator. There was a terrible moment of shared breathlessness, and then Yumi walked in, alone, and closed the door behind her. If it was possible for facial bones to look dark, hers did.

“No good,” she spat, twirling her hat around on one finger too quickly to plead calmness. “Not a hair of ’im to be found. We looked everywhere, ’n Cody’s worn herself out so she’s basically thin air. She’s restin’ upstairs now.”

With that said, she marched over to her usual seat and collapsed into the welcoming arms of the sofa. They were about the only welcoming things in the room: Gardenia was pacing in the corner; Mireille was perched on the windowsill, fretting so hard that she’d already ripped stitches; Raymond had shoved his hands in his pockets and wasn’t meeting anyone’s eyes; Walter was scowling at the carpet in a way that looked worryingly close to tears; Dogma was floating about frantically; and Kantera— oh, Kantera was sitting as straight as if he’d been pinned in place, with none of the easy, loose grace he usually carried himself in. Tabasa sat back down and took his hand, squeezing it, but got no response.

“What are we going to do?”

Mireille was the one to ask, in the end. She didn’t stutter, or hesitate: she was just looking out of the window as if waiting for Russell to come into view. “It’s almost night. Again. What are we going to do?”

No one had an answer. Tabasa wanted to sink into the cushions and disappear, back to a world where none of this had happened. A world where Russell didn’t apparently have ‘incidents’ if he left the house, like everyone but Tabasa had known about.

“We could…”

Walter’s voice was like ice cubes dropped into still water: everyone looked at him, and he looked away with a frown, fiddling with his coat. “We could get the police involved. They have the resources necessary for a search like this.”

Yumi crossed her arms. “We’re not gettin’ the fuzz involved in this – the fuck’s wrong with you? You think we want to be found out an’ have Russell taken away from us even if they do find him?”

“Of course I don’t,” Walter said in a stiffer voice, still looking at the floor. “I’m just saying that there’s not much we can do by ourselves. It’s getting dark, and he’s got a hell of a head-start on us. I don’t want to get the police involved either, but I also want Russell back safely.”

No one could fault him on that. No one could think of anything else to say, either: none of them wanted to call on the police, but what else was there?

It was a testament to how scared Tabasa was that he was even considering the option. His fear was like something dark spinning in his stomach, demanding his attention at every turn so he couldn’t relax for a second. He began to chew on his lip and leant on Kantera’s shoulder. There was no give there, no real response, but it was comforting anyway – it was _something_. He squeezed Kantera’s hand again and looked to the side through his fringe, meeting his gaze. He looked as rigid with worry as his body felt, impotence chaining him up, and Tabasa knew how painful it must have been. Powerlessness wasn’t something any of them dealt with well, but some dealt with it worse than others.

Tabasa was one of those, too.

“I want him back,” came Mireille’s voice, quiet but clear.

Everyone looked at her.

“I want him _back_ ,” she said again, clutching her apron so tightly it looked close to tearing in her hands. Then she turned to look at them all, letting them all see how close to crying she was. “W-what did we do wrong? Didn’t we love him enough? Should we have spent…spent more time listening to him? Should we have tried harder to…to make him talk about what was bothering him? Why would he run away? D-Doesn’t he know how much we want him back?!”

It was horrible, seeing her like that. She brought her apron to her eyes and sunk her face into it, leaning on the window frame and hunching her shoulders like she was hiding. Yumi went over to her at once, put an arm around her, and stroked her back as she began to cry. It was a small and broken sound in the echoing room, soon back to unsteady gasps; the rest of them could hardly breathe either. Her misery was tangible: Tabasa didn’t know what to do with it, he just didn’t want to be here. But there was nowhere else to go: what could _he_ do? All he was good for was worrying and waiting for something to change.

“Hey…” Gardenia paused and started again, her voice ringing with false cheeriness. “Why don’t we try it once more? Searching, I mean. It’s night, so Russell might have gone to sleep or something, so… And if Kantera, Raymond and I try, we might have a better chance, because we can see in the dark and all… So it might be worth a try, mightn’t it?”

Yumi – still holding Mireille – looked at her, and everyone looked at Yumi, waiting for her decision. Tabasa began to wet his lips, trying to find words to push out into the swamp of tension, but Raymond got there first.

“I sure think it’s worth a try,” he said. “Better than nothing. I mean yeah, the chances of us actually finding him now he’s got a day’s head-start on us aren’t great, but…” –he shrugged– “…better than nothing.”

Yumi paused, sharing a look with Dogma, who had come to hover next to her. Then she said, “Gardenia, I dunno if…”

“I’ll be fine,” Gardenia hurried to assure her. “Even if another incident happens, it’s already had me.”

Of course it had. Tabasa had been told: _it_ had had everyone but him. So it stood to reason, then, that he should stay well away: stay here, where it was safe.

“I want to go too,” he said.

The communal gaze shifted to him, and grew more concerned. They all knew, of course: everyone knew that he was the only one who hadn’t had any experience with the incidents. He’d been coddled and protected, and he was sick of it.

“Tabasa…” Kantera’s voice was as soft as ever, and it sent a shiver down Tabasa’s back, but perhaps that was the guilt. “I really cannot recommend…”

“I want to go too,” Tabasa repeated, firmer now. His hand, in Kantera’s, was shaking. “Everyone else got through theirs fine, didn’t they? You’re all alive. I’m the only one, so what if I need to go through it to end all this? And…and it’s not fair that you all get hints into what you can’t remember while I just get this stupid fucking _frustration_.”

All of his housemates looked at him sympathetically, in perfect understanding. That made it worse, really. It hadn’t exactly been a lie, but it wasn’t frustration that made him speak up: it was the guilt, the restlessness, the keening need to be anywhere but in that room. But whatever it was, sympathy was what made everyone agree that – with any luck – it would probably be fine, and either way, they had little to lose now, if Tabasa was sure of this himself.

And so it was that he found himself trudging through the woods after sunset, a lantern in one hand because he hadn’t been blessed with night vision (even his day vision was dodgy at times). Gardenia and Raymond had gone off together with the vague hope that Raymond would act as supervision (that hope would have been laughable, if any of them felt like laughing), and – after a brief goodbye kiss and promise to be careful, Kantera had gone to search in a different direction as well. So it was just Tabasa, the dim circle of light around him, and the ghostly choir of sounds found in a forest at night.

It was uncomfortable. It set his nerves on end, but more than that, it was the quiet that unnerved him the most, because there was no tension here to fill up his brain with static. There was relative silence, and that left time for the intrusive, unwelcome thoughts he’d been avoiding to come to light.

How could he have missed something so important? It was galling, and downright embarrassing, but the fact was that he’d never noticed. Russell was quiet: a good kid, but so quiet and shut in on himself that sometimes you wondered if he felt anything at all. And wasn’t that a nice excuse to wave away how Tabasa hadn’t noticed a damn thing about how badly the boy was hurting? He was supposed to be the empathetic one. He was supposed to be…fuck, he didn’t know. He was supposed to be better.

He wasn’t supposed to be wrapped up in cotton by everyone else, like he was too immature to understand that something bad was up. And fine, he understood why Yumi, Mireille and Kantera had kept quiet (even if Kantera’s silence hurt more than he’d show), because apparently that had all been years ago, but after Gardenia’s run-in with…whatever it was, there had been no excuse. But they’d waited: they’d waited two weeks until Cody and Dogma got attacked and Russell ran away. They hadn’t seen fit to let him know.

Tabasa felt so small, so useless.

The sounds around him were getting worse: there were little chirrupy things like crickets or something, but since when did crickets live in forests? And then, at the very edge of the golden glow of the lantern, he kept seeing things skittering away on the leaf-strewn forest floor, and it was getting harder to convince himself they were just mice or other small animals. Some of them had far too many legs for that, and he caught at least one of the things staring at him before it shuffled away. After that, he kept his eyes ahead of him and continued walking – shivering, but not against the cold he barely felt.

He pushed his thoughts away from that, and they began to sink again.

The worst part was that they’d been right to keep it from him. He’d have freaked out: he’d have been constantly on his toes around Russell if he’d found out, and that wouldn’t have been good for anyone. And what could he have done? He was basically powerless, especially against whatever was up with Russell. He couldn’t even remember his own past. The fact of the matter was that he hadn’t needed to know, and he couldn’t have done anything if they had told him, but even though he knew that was true, it gave him a headache just thinking about the whole thing.

Not trustworthy.

Not reliable.

Fuck, he really was getting a headache. At first, he’d thought the high-pitched sound was just part of the noise around him, but he could definitely feel pain now. He frowned and brought a hand to his temple, massaging it, but the ringing in his head wouldn’t go away. If anything, it was just getting worse. So absorbed in it was he that he didn’t look where he was going and almost stumbled over a stray root. The lantern swung in his hand, the circle of light flying, and he cursed the house for not having any torches handy. Of course they had to be stuck with fucking lanterns.

After the third, similar stumble, he began to think that something was wrong with his legs. He stopped for a moment, checking the stitching, but there were no real problems – nothing he hadn’t walked through before, at any rate. So he picked the lantern back up and began to walk again (but everything looked the same now: hadn’t he seen that fork in the path before? And that bush – surely that shape was familiar?). Confused as he was, he hadn’t gone ten steps before the dizziness began to come over him. The noises that had haunted him since he’d set foot in the damn place had grown louder, but duller too: a distant chorus in his ears. He almost fancied he could hear voices among the chaos. But it kept growing louder and softer; his legs kept failing him; his head still felt too light, swimming with thoughts he hated the taste of. He began to sway in place, gasping for breath. If he could just get to a tree to steady himself…if he could just move his body…

But he acted too late. With the sound of distant, chattering laughter in his ears, he stopped thinking altogether, and then there was nothing.

 

 

Russell’s head hurt. Surprisingly, it had nothing to do with how the Informant had been trying to get him to talk about his feelings for what felt like an hour, and he couldn’t say it was mere dehydration either: he couldn’t lie to himself like that. If he could, he would have answered the Informant.

No, it was nothing like that: as impossible as the idea was, it felt like the beginnings of a headache he recognised. And, no matter how far into the unforgiving darkness he walked with his hands held out to feel for any obstacles, no matter how much chilly air he breathed in, it wouldn’t go away.

“Russell…”

No, no, _don’t_.

“…is something wrong? It’s only…I can feel…”

_Don’t_.

“…is this another headache?”

“It can’t be.”

He answered before he’d meant to, and the short answer seemed to throw the Informant. Russell couldn’t see him anymore: the puddles were drying up, and if he was around at all, it was weakly. His voice was frail in Russell’s ears.

“What else can it be?”

“It can’t be,” Russell repeated, staring into the darkness. “We’re alone here. There’s no one for it to prey on. It’s nothing.”

He almost tripped over something – he couldn’t see what, in the gloom – and had to steady himself on a tree. For a few seconds, he rested there, but then he felt something move under his fingers, and he ripped them away, brushing them off hurriedly before walking away quickly.

“Russell….” His voice was faint now, barely audible, but echoing in the darkness. “You know it’s happening again.”

“It’s not. It can’t be.”

“Just…” He seemed to swallow, and his voice was thick when he spoke next. “Just accept it. Please try to accept it. Don’t run away. You’re hurting yourself.”

“I don’t care.”

He expected a sad kind of rebuttal – the type he was used to receiving from the Informant whenever he said anything self-deprecating or –destructive – but nothing came. That was strange, so he stopped moving, listening out for a voice so familiar it seemed to fill up the cracks in his chest with warmth whenever he heard it, but nothing came.

The Informant never gave silent treatment. So that was that, then.

Russell began to walk again. He went slower now: it wasn’t as if there was any rush. There was nowhere to go, no one to meet, nothing to look forward to. He didn’t really need any of those things: all he needed was the distance stretching out between him and people he could hurt. What happened to him didn’t matter. So he trudged through murky darkness, letting it fill up his eyes and ears and nose and lungs, and he almost jumped when he heard the outline of a voice.

At first, he thought it was the Informant, but he only needed to hear another burst of it to know that that was wrong, and he froze. He couldn’t be found: not now, not after he’d tried so hard. He knew he’d never be able to break away again if they found him.

So, listening, he stayed as still as one of the shadow-like trees around him: only visible at the very edges, like they were in different shades of black. The voice came again, but no – there were more of them now. Laughter. It was laughter, he realised.

Without quite knowing why, he began to back away.

The laughter didn’t fade: it was like the chatter of birds, but ceaseless, and it seemed to grate on his headache so all he could hear was the scratchy sound of it getting closer. He moved faster, his hands held out behind him to scrape against bark and twigs, but the laughter kept gaining on him until – with a sickening rush of ice through his chest – he heard it surround him.

Russell stopped moving. Almost immediately after he had, the darkness was pierced by a faint light: the most part of his attention was already eaten up by the laughter, but somehow, through the pounding in his head, he saw the gradual lightening of earth and leaves on the ground, the inky shadows pooling by his feet. The light was coming from behind him. Behind, where there was nothing in the way of his hands now, though he moved them like feelers, searching for any sort of stability.

But there was only empty air. So, with his head too full of cacophonous laughter to care, he turned around.

It was difficult to see at first: what with the blaring light of what looked like a lantern, all he could make out was the vague shape of something humanoid behind it. Russell’s breath was laboured, and his hands began to creep to his ears, as if to block out the rough, rasping noise, but he already knew that would be useless. The laughter had wormed its way into his ears, biting into the flesh and refusing to let go. All he could do was endure it, like he’d endured the flames, like he’d endured Gardenia’s screams.

Slowly, the figure bent to lower the lantern, and bile rose in Russell’s throat when he recognised Tabasa’s hood. What was he doing here? Why hadn’t he said anything yet? Why was he so calm? Why him? For the love of all that was good in the world – for the love of everything that had abandoned Russell, why _him_?!

But then Tabasa straightened up, Russell saw him properly, and his panic filtered away into the comforting embrace of dread. Tabasa wasn’t here to scold him and tell him how worried they’d been and take him back despite his protests. No, he was here for something quite different. His face was a mockery of mirth: a hollow smile gaping from cheekbone to cheekbone, the raw, bloodless flesh glowing obscenely pink in the lantern’s light. His eyes were glazed over, his limbs as limp as a puppet with its strings cut.

It had already happened, then. There was nothing he could do, then.

Tabasa began to laugh. He was the conductor, and the other, bodiless voices picked up on his cue, laughing like high-speed machinery, like cogs and gears and teeth clashing together and crashing into Russell’s ears. He covered them with his palms, and it made no difference.

“Stop.”

His voice was barely a whisper, and the laughter picked up to cover it, smother it. He shook his head and tried to back away again, but his legs were leaden now, his eyes glued to the not-smile on not-Tabasa’s face.

( _That’s right: tell yourself it’s not him. Let’s pretend none of this is real_ )

“Stop,” he pleaded, his ears aching with how hard he was pushing his hands into them, trying to block out anything, but still hearing everything. He couldn’t tear his eyes from the sight of Tabasa laughing: shoulders bobbing up and down robotically, the skin twitching around his ripped, warped smile. The shadows were like smears of ink dancing over his face, and Russell couldn’t look away now, couldn’t think of anything but this aching laughter rattling around in his head, mocking him, and it wasn’t _fair_. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, it’s not fair, why won’t he stop laughing at you, _why won’t he_ _stop laughing at you?!_ You did everything you could, you ran away like you should have, you did everything you could think of, so you just want him to stop laughing at you, just shut up, shut up, shut up, you just want him to shut up! Your hands are throbbing with the need to squeeze, to rip, to tear out this wretched sound that mocks you for your efforts, for trying to be good. You only wanted to save them all! You only wanted to stop hurting them all! But no, not you: you’re not allowed that, you know, you feel like the knowledge is burs sticking and scratching your skin. You’re cursed and you’ll never, ever, ever be allowed love, so you took yourself away from it all so they could live happily without you just like how it’s supposed to be, but you can never run away – you’re cursed, you only bring unhappiness, you’re a plague on everyone who tried to love you, you sick, useless freak, you leech, you _parasite_.

A flash.

A flash of something.

You strain your stinging eyes: there’s a knife on the ground, by your feet, glinting in the light. It’s there, so it’s always been there. It was always supposed to be there.

Laughter scrapes every inch of your skin like sandpaper, and you remember: you have the strength to take what you want.

You want him to shut up.

Creaking, crumbling, your limbs snap into place when you reach for the knife, and the smoothness of the hilt in your hand is a gust of wind to blow away the sticky, sticky cobwebs of laughter strung through your skull. It fits into your hand like a key to a lock, opening up your potential, and you can breathe now. It’s fine now. This had to happen: there’s no other choice. This is who you are. This is what you are.

Shakily, you walk towards Tabasa.

The laughter is still roaring around you, but you know what to do to shut it up. You’ve always known. You’ve always, always known how to quiet down those thoughts – the ‘I’m a burden to everyone’, the ‘I can only hurt people’, the ‘I don’t belong here’. All it takes is this. All it’s ever taken is this: total acceptance of what you are. Isn’t that what the Informant meant? No, but you can bastardise his words so it is.

_Accept it._

So you walk closer, your body trembling like a speaker shuddering with the force of the music it plays, but the knife is very still, and sure of what to do. You’re close now; it’s so easy, and you have no choice, and everything will go back to what it should be if you just do this one thing, if you just shut up this cackling monstrosity in front of you, and even if something feels wrong, you don’t have a _choice_ , and then Russell froze, his breath caught in his throat as he felt something touch the top of his head.

Warmth. The shape of a hand.

“What are you doing, Russell?” Raymond asked sadly, in the voice of someone who knows the answer and hates that they do.

You’re choking, you’re suffocating, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t

“Russell, please.” Gardenia’s voice was small, tight with emotion. Tentatively, she came to his side and put a hand on his forearm, and then – seeing no resistance – reached out to hold the knife, her hand over his.

Stop touching me, I’ll curse you, I’ll bring nothing but misfortune to you, I’ll

Raymond began to ruffle his hair, softly. So softly, it was more like stroking, and the sheer fatigue he felt weighed every stroke down. The laughter was wrapping around the three of them – couldn’t they hear it? – and Russell couldn’t move, because if he moved, he would have to choose what to be. He would have to choose to hold onto the knife or to let it go. Their touches were burning him, the glint of tears in Gardenia’s eyes was burning him, the solidity of Raymond’s arm around his shoulders was burning him.

“Russell, please,” Gardenia said again, firmly. “This isn’t right: just…just stop. This isn’t who you are.”

“You’re better than this, kid.” Raymond’s voice was gravelly with exhaustion. “I know you’re better than this. Let’s just…let the knife go, yeah? You can do better than this.”

“And…and even if you can’t, we’ll help.” Gardenia squeezed his hand, trying for a broken sort of smile. It looked ghoulish in the irregular, flickering light. “We’ll help you through this, okay? You haven’t done anything wrong, apart from run away. And yeah, we’re all angry about that, but it’s only because we love you so much. We love you, Russell, and we know you can do this. Whatever it is you have to do, you’ve got us this time.”

She didn’t understand how damned he was. But she was also here, holding his hand and fully aware of the knife it held. They were both here, they had both seen what he had been doing (he hadn’t wanted to, he hadn’t, but he’d had no _choice_ ), and they were here saying they believed in him.

_Accept it_.

Russell was saved having to answer (he couldn’t have if he’d tried: his teeth were clenched together as if they were welded that way) by an all-too familiar chill through his bones. The others felt it, he could tell from how they stiffened, and even the laughter seemed to wane for a moment, before picking back up manically, shrieking like fireworks.

The thing stepped through Tabasa’s body as if it were mist. It went leisurely, inevitably, and came before Russell. It had already had Tabasa, after all.

“ _YOU CAN RUN FROM ME BUT YOU CAN NEVER RUN FROM YOUR SIN_ ,” came the voice. It was thunder through his flesh, lightning spearing his brain, and he couldn’t look away from the shadow looming over him – it was smoke rising from the lantern, reaching out to take Russell by the throat.

“ _YOU CAN RUN FROM ME BUT YOU CAN NEVER RUN FROM YOUR SIN_.”

Again, again.

“ _YOU CAN RUN FROM ME BUT YOU CAN NEVER RUN FROM YOUR SIN_.”

The words were being branded into his mind, and he could feel that the others heard them too, but none of them moved. There was no point.

There was no fighting this. There had never been any point to that, either. In some way, he thought he’d always known that, but he’d been too much of a coward to accept it.

“ _YOU CAN RUN FROM ME BUT YOU CAN NEVER RUN FROM YOUR SIN_.”

“I know,” Russell said. His mouth was coated with bitterness, and he let the knife go as if flinching; the dull thud it made changed nothing.

“I know,” he said again, staring at the nearest blinking eye of the thing. “I can’t run away. It doesn’t work. I killed them and I can’t run away from that. I know.”

There was no immediate change. It was as if the night itself was holding its breath, and even the laughter faded away to leave only nauseating pounding in Russell’s ears. He waited. He was good at that. He felt so hollow that he might have blown away if Gardenia and Raymond hadn’t been there to hold him in place. The three of them stood there, and breathed, and waited for the thing to act.

It didn’t, in the end. The silence stretched out further and further, and Russell felt the familiar sting of memories returning. That was that, then. He remembered it all. It wasn’t such a surprise: there wasn’t much left to remember. At his side, Gardenia tensed and pulled her hand away from him (so she’d remembered it all too; so this was the end), but before she could recoil further, the smoke in front of them began to break up.

Holding his hands to the ragged sides of his mouth, Tabasa walked forwards unsteadily through the wispy remains of the thing, dispersing it. He stopped just short of Russell and stared at him, expression unreadable. That was wrong. Tabasa was supposed to be an open book. But this was what he deserved, so Russell steeled himself, because this was what it meant, to face your sin. To not run away. To accept, and to accept what the people you have wronged choose to give you.

So he stayed quite still, trying to ignore how Gardenia’s hand was hovering over his (he didn’t deserve hesitation, he only deserved rejection), and held Tabasa’s gaze.

Without warning, Tabasa’s face crumpled. “Oh, _Russell_ ,” he said, on the verge of tears, and all but fell down to hug him. Russell stiffened, the sudden stability of another person’s body destabilising him, made even worse when Gardenia joined in, crying out his name before really bursting into tears, and Raymond started ruffling his hair again, the strokes unstable. It was too much, and he deserved none of it: his chest was clenching uncomfortably, his eyes were stinging again, and he was so dreadfully tired, but the very thought of them ever letting him go made the pain in his chest a hundred times worse.

It wasn’t over: he knew that. He wasn’t, after all, obtuse. But they were here. They knew what he’d done, and they were still here.

Weak with exhaustion, Russell closed his eyes, collapsed into their arms, and lost consciousness.

 

 

“How do you feel?”

Russell tried to open his eyes, and found he couldn’t. It was as if he hadn’t muscles to move or eyes to open, and when he tried to move his hand, he realised he didn’t have that either, or any part of his body.

The Informant spoke up again: “Don’t worry: it won’t last for long. You’ll wake up soon.”

“I don’t want to.”

A short pause. “We both know that’s wrong, though. Did you think I’d believe you? You don’t even believe you, so ipso facto I’m not about to.”

“I don’t want to want to go back.”

“That’s better.” His voice gave away a small smile. “The guilt’s too much, isn’t it? You’ve been made to face everything and you can’t take it. That’s okay. You’ll have help. But you need to go back, even if you think it would be nobler not to. It wouldn’t be, you know.”

“I…” If he had been physical, he would have swallowed, and the lack of muscles to contract left him feeling hollow. “I can’t, though. Even if they forgive me – and they won’t all do that, and they _shouldn’t_ – it’s just going to happen again.”

“It’s not.” It sounded like an attempt at being comforting, but it only got halfway.

“It will. You know that as well as I do. This is it: this is all there is, and nothing I do will make any difference. I might as well stay here.”

“Russell, you can’t think like that…”

“But that’s how it is,” he said, cutting across hurriedly. “You know I’m cursed: I’m only going to bring them unhappiness again, so—”

“ _Russell_.”

There was no outside noise, or breathing, or rustling of clothes to fill up the silence. Russell waited.

“Just…” The Informant’s voice was unsteady. “Just stop, okay? You know that’s not true. Stop lying to yourself. You’re not cursed: you killed them with your mind and will intact. There were outside forces and circumstances and all of that, but you did it because you wanted what they had, not because of some curse or spell or anything else.”

He knew that. He knew it just suited him better to say he was cursed, like drowning himself in negativity would save him from having to take responsibility.

“So,” the Informant said.

So.

“So let’s stop that. Let’s be practical. You need to go back. You…you need to go and face it all. Okay?”

Silence dragged on.

“Russell, can’t you answer me? You know how to go back, don’t you? Russell, please…please don’t make me push you out. I’ll…I’ll do it, you know? You can’t…stay here.”

He knew that. But he couldn’t bring himself to answer: just for a little while longer, he wanted to avoid everything he was going to have to face. He could already feel the squirming, boiling guilt like a shadow of sensation.

“Russell, please. We can’t do this ‘just five more minutes’ thing here – I won’t…” He collected himself, said more forcefully, “You have to go now. Look, on the count of three you need to get out, okay? One…two…”

Three, four, five, six, seven, and still no body.

Russell said, “You had me going for a moment there.”

“I’m sorry.” It was a ragged hiss between something that might have been sobs. “I…I know you need to leave, I know, I know, I’ve always known, but I can’t say it. I can’t kick you out: I could never do that. The more you stay here, the more I want you to stay forever and that’s…that’s not _right_.” A pause, and his voice was steadier when he said, “It’s simple, isn’t it? I'm you but you're not me. I need you but you don't need me. So you need to leave.”

He had to. Such was the way of things.

“Alright.”

There was a sigh of relief. “Good. Good, that’s…that’s how it’s supposed to be. I’ll still be with you: I’ll help you through it all, I promise. There’s nothing scary about this. It’s just how things are going to be.”

There wasn’t really much more to it than that. So Russell went back, but before he quite woke up, he felt the feather-soft touch of something warm on his cheek.

 

 

In the end, the trial – as Russell called it despite how much the Informant told him not to – didn’t last long. For the most part, everything that had to be done, was: it was mutually confirmed that everyone had remembered; those who felt comfortable with it shared their stories; the situation was explained vaguely to Raymond and Walter, who promised to explain it in even vaguer terms to Fairia and Yue, with whom the chain of communication would stop; and Russell was kept in his room until the others had decided what to do.

It wasn’t a bad time. It was the calm before the storm, Russell had always been more suited to solitude, and the Informant was there, anyway. And, when she could slip in unnoticed, Gardenia was there too. She wanted to talk, and read the magazines Raymond brought for them together, and have meaningless arguments. She didn’t talk about her murder, and she wouldn’t let him talk about it either.

The others weren’t so brisk about it.

Tabasa and Gardenia were the only ones who forgave him immediately. While he was on probation, Tabasa brought him food and entertainment and – unaware that Gardenia came every night to chat – gave him updates on how everyone was feeling. He laughed most of it off nervously, making light of how everyone was a lot more pensive nowadays, and – later – how Walter had gone into another snit because he thought that Russell should just be brought into human care if the household was keeping him under lock and key (an exaggeration: they didn’t lock the door, and didn’t need to). Every visit brought with it a hug, and if some of them were a little desperate, a little too much like Tabasa was forcing himself to remember past affections, then that was just how things were.

Cody, Dogma and Mireille came around next, almost all at the same time. At least, that was how it felt to Russell. One day Tabasa was telling him that nothing seemed to be changing (‘…but give it a little while and things’ll be fine, I promise!’), and the next, Cody and Dogma were waiting for him in his room when he came out of the bathroom – Cody floating on the bed lazily and Dogma hovering primly over a chair. They didn’t want to talk about much: Dogma just asked why he did it, and he answered truthfully. Cody asked how he’d felt afterwards, how he felt now, and he answered truthfully. That was all. Dogma still seemed uncomfortable around him, and wouldn’t come close, but he tried to smile, and Cody remarked dryly that it could have been worse: at least they weren’t wholly dead.

Mireille came the next morning with his breakfast. For some time, she chattered about how the house was getting on and how Saxon was holding up (still in his coffin, having missed the entire affair), but after a while she grew quiet. As Russell finished his coffee, she said softly that she wasn’t angry with him. She said that she thought it might, in fact, have been for the best. Destructive infatuation wasn’t the best foundation for a relationship, or indeed a life, she explained, staring at her hands. At least here, Saxon would never leave her, because he would never wake up. At least now, she could pretend everything was exactly how she’d wanted it, with no need to hurt anyone. And anyway, she added in a cheerier voice, she was so happy here, with everyone. If what had happened hadn’t happened at all, she never would have been able to live the way she did now. That was what mattered to her. So she patted Russell’s shoulder, picked up the tray, and left.

Once the door had shut, Russell fell back onto his bed and stared at the ceiling for a long time.

After six days, he was asked down to one of the parlours for tea with Yumi and Kantera. Or rather, with Kantera, and Yumi sat in without drinking anything. The meeting was not comfortable, but nor was it excruciating. He was still waiting for the rage, the attacks and attempts at revenge, so it was unsettling when the worst reaction he received was a set of chilly words across a polished tea set, Yumi warning him to keep himself in check or she’d do it for him, and Kantera saying mildly that if he ever caught Russell pointing a weapon at someone again, he would restrain him however necessary.

(Tabasa had told him, a few days earlier, that Kantera had arrived at the clearing in the forest just in time to see Russell seemingly held back from attacking Tabasa, and hadn’t quite got over it yet.)

They didn’t seem angry. If anything, they seemed weary of it all, and ready to forgive him if it weren’t for their duties towards the family. Really, he was lucky: he had expected far worse. He hadn’t deserved a single person’s forgiveness, and yet he had been given implicit permission to stay by all of them.

“What did you expect, really?” Raymond asked, laughing, when Russell mentioned it to him later that night. “You saw how much they loved you, right? That sort of thing doesn’t just fade. I mean sure, maybe logically you should hate the person who killed you, but if you’ve got years of loving them under your belt, well…” He spread his arms, lounging back into the unwelcomingly hard bench they were sitting on. “Not much you can do.”

Russell nodded, if only to show he was listening, and stared at his feet. It was getting just a little difficult to see them, like the darkness was gauze in front of his eyes. He could barely see the deep grooves he had been digging in the earth ever since Raymond had suggested they sit down before heading back.

“Look, kid… Is it getting….you know, too much? Because if you want, Walter and…well, okay, not us two, but Fairia could definitely get your name down in the right places to get you fostered or something. I know, it’s a big word, but if this is getting to be too much, then it might be an idea. A new start.”

“That’s not what I want.”

Raymond looked him up and down before shrugging and pulling out a hip flask from his coat pocket. “Suit yourself. Good to be sure about these things, I guess.”

He took a long drink and capped the flask again, staring into the gloom of twilight. If it had been lighter, the view of the sprawling vegetable garden would have been a pleasant one (Mireille and Tabasa certainly spent enough time working on it), but as it was, Russell had nothing to look at but his own hands and feet. It had been a while since he’d been outside, and the fresh air seemed to chill him.

“Hey…” Raymond sighed, shifting a little so he could look at Russell more comfortably. “Do you still feel bad? Guilty, I mean.”

Russell shrugged. There were no reflective surfaces; no Informant to tell him to be more honest. He was fed up with being honest after the week he’d had.

“That’s normal,” Raymond said, apparently undaunted by the lack of verbal response. He was fiddling with his flask now, spinning it in his hand. “It’s a good sign. I know it can feel like a total fucking pain – don’t tell anyone I swore in front of you – to care about it all when there’s just so…so much of it, but it’s a good thing, even if it does hurt like a bitch. It’s how you’re supposed to feel – you know that, right? Good.” He looked up at the sky and said again, “…good. Definitely good.”

He seemed to hesitate. Then, in an airy voice that sounded artificial, he added, “Say, don’t know if I ever told you, but back when I was a teenager, I wasn’t exactly…hot on humans. Thought that if I was going to have to choose which I was, I might as well go for the one with all the freedom, you know? Well, long story short, I got caught up with a pretty nasty gang and killed more than a few people. So I know what I’m talking about, is what I’m saying. You can trust me on that. I get it.”

Russell looked up, but Raymond was still staring at the sky, his jaw a little tighter than normal. A cloud passed over the moon and light hit the metal cap of his hip-flask; Russell heard the Informant’s voice resonating in his head like it belonged there: “Try and comfort him. Do you think you can? Just a small gesture’s fine.”

So Russell leant over and put his hand over Raymond’s. Not patting, not stroking: just his hand, and Raymond looked over. He looked strange without his hat. Unfinished, almost. His earring swung, glittering in the moonlight.

In the distance, footsteps (fast, like someone was running) became audible.

“You’re a good kid,” Raymond said, finally smiling again. “It’s not the end of the world, you know. They’re still basically alive. Sentient, at least. And you can fix things yet: it’s never too late for second chances, yeah?”

Russell hesitated, then nodded, and the two of them settled back against the bench, satisfied with the sparse conversation, until Gardenia appeared on the path.

After confirming what Raymond was drinking, begging for a sip and subsequently almost throwing up when she drank too much, she waved away Russell’s hand and Raymond’s snappy complaints that he’d told her to be careful and began to drag them back to the house. It was dinner, she said, and they’d had a new shipment of blood, so they had to hurry before Kantera hogged all the good stuff. Listening to her and Raymond discuss the qualities to look for in high-quality blood, Russell followed silently. Gardenia’s hand was firm on his, Raymond kept looking over as if to make sure he was still there, and off in the distance, the windows of the house were lit up warmly.

“He was right, you know,” the Informant said quietly. “It’s never too late for second chances. It’s going to be okay, Russell.”

And maybe it would be. Eventually, when the guilt had faded, when he had begun to redeem himself, maybe it would be okay. But until then, at least he was in loving company.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will support not-really-canon-at-all Gardenia + Raymond friendship to my grave.
> 
> Anyway, this series was supposed to have more chapters (I definitely missed one developing Russell and Tabasa's relationship......oops.............) but I guess that's just how things are sometimes. Sorry it's a bit of a rushed ending, and again, sorry it's so late. At least I had fun with this vaguely-experimental final chapter. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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